How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[dan/california]

Just now, danfrodo said:

Maybe it's desperate attempt to get UKR to negotiating table to try to freeze the conflict.  I expect lots of staged 'attacks' on nuke plant.  What other cards to Putin have to play other than creating damage that he hopes will get URK to the table?  he can't win but he can lose big and soon.  

Il like this post, i could have JUST liked this post, if only I had any likes left.....

[poesel]

I predict that Russia will fall apart before the year ends. There I said it. Wishful thinking, but someone has to take the early spot.

[dan/california]

1 minute ago, RandomCommenter said:

Hi guys,

Long time lurker, first time poster here. I have been reading these boards since early March and I have to say that this is the single best source on the internet I have found to find out what is actually going on on the ground in Ukraine. I also really respect the way you guys generally keep it civil and the community you have built with things like the laptop for Haiduk. So massive respect to you all from me.

 

One question I have, if I may. Something I have not seen a lot of discussion of recently is that early in the war the Ukrainians were terrified of the Russian Air Force. There was a lot of pressure to "close the skies" and a lot of debate about how NATO trying to run a no-fly zone / SEAD mission could easily escalate into war. But we have not heard much recently on this front. The Russian Air Force are absent. My question is, why? What turned the tide?

I know the Ukrainians managed to disperse their fighter jets and miraculously are still flying six months later using highways to take off. So that is one threat. And there is the MANPAD threat and those MANPADs are all over Ukraine now. We have the British Starstreak system went in. And we saw in July that the US announced some NASAMS systems (National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System) that went in.

 

But is that it? If you guys have time I would be interested in your take on what exactly turned the tide in the air war here. Apologies if this topic was previously addressed in some of the posts on here (it is a challenge to read it all).

 

Anyway thanks again for all the hours you put in making sense of this conflict to the extent that you can in the midst of the fog of war.

 

Slava Ukraini!

There are multiple volumes to be written about how the Ukrainians have kept the Russian air force bottled up, and the info to write most of them is going to be classified until the war ends or well after. The thing I will state briefly is that the Russian air force is just not the the big growling bear we thought it it was. What on paper are pretty good airplanes, in fairly large numbers, have performed far below expectations due to some combination of technical problems, unskilled pilots, and a completely broken system for picking and prioritizing targets. One specific mistake was starting this war with perhaps a tenth, or even less, of the precision guided weapons needed. It is hard to overstate the size of this failure on the course of the war. Pretty clear someone, maybe everyone, stole a lot of money. they have lost this war because of it.

[chrisl]

54 minutes ago, Huba said:

Here's a photo. It looks like the dam itself is unaffected, but the gates were hit and water is going through. Perhaps it means that whole volume of the reservoir won't be released? 

It really depends on the flow rate through the gates and how much the downstream channel can handle.  We have a series of dams around here that look comparable in what they hold back.  They get completely drained regularly (sometimes every year) through a 60 km long channel that is normally nearly dry.  The water level comes up quite a lot when they drain the reservoirs, then settles down.

[Battlefront.com]

Another lingering "but Russia is soooo strong" analyst reversed his opinion after the Kharkiv offensive.  The interesting thing is he admitted he had it wrong.  Took him 6 months, but hey he at least said it:

https://unherd.com/thepost/clint-ehrlich-what-i-got-wrong-about-ukraine/

Best I can figure is this is one of those guys who is so opposed to war that he can't bring himself to understand it.  It's sad, though, because he does have quite a good grasp of what is going on in many ways, but missing some really basic analytical skills.

Steve

[hcrof]

14 minutes ago, RandomCommenter said:

Hi guys,

Long time lurker, first time poster here. I have been reading these boards since early March and I have to say that this is the single best source on the internet I have found to find out what is actually going on on the ground in Ukraine. I also really respect the way you guys generally keep it civil and the community you have built with things like the laptop for Haiduk. So massive respect to you all from me.

 

One question I have, if I may. Something I have not seen a lot of discussion of recently is that early in the war the Ukrainians were terrified of the Russian Air Force. There was a lot of pressure to "close the skies" and a lot of debate about how NATO trying to run a no-fly zone / SEAD mission could easily escalate into war. But we have not heard much recently on this front. The Russian Air Force are absent. My question is, why? What turned the tide?

I know the Ukrainians managed to disperse their fighter jets and miraculously are still flying six months later using highways to take off. So that is one threat. And there is the MANPAD threat and those MANPADs are all over Ukraine now. We have the British Starstreak system went in. And we saw in July that the US announced some NASAMS systems (National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System) that went in.

 

But is that it? If you guys have time I would be interested in your take on what exactly turned the tide in the air war here. Apologies if this topic was previously addressed in some of the posts on here (it is a challenge to read it all).

 

Anyway thanks again for all the hours you put in making sense of this conflict to the extent that you can in the midst of the fog of war.

 

Slava Ukraini!

https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/rusi-defence-systems/russian-air-force-actually-incapable-complex-air-operations

I think this article, while written very early on in the war, is still relevant. 

[Huba]

17 minutes ago, RandomCommenter said:

Hi guys,

Long time lurker, first time poster here. I have been reading these boards since early March and I have to say that this is the single best source on the internet I have found to find out what is actually going on on the ground in Ukraine. I also really respect the way you guys generally keep it civil and the community you have built with things like the laptop for Haiduk. So massive respect to you all from me.

 

One question I have, if I may. Something I have not seen a lot of discussion of recently is that early in the war the Ukrainians were terrified of the Russian Air Force. There was a lot of pressure to "close the skies" and a lot of debate about how NATO trying to run a no-fly zone / SEAD mission could easily escalate into war. But we have not heard much recently on this front. The Russian Air Force are absent. My question is, why? What turned the tide?

I know the Ukrainians managed to disperse their fighter jets and miraculously are still flying six months later using highways to take off. So that is one threat. And there is the MANPAD threat and those MANPADs are all over Ukraine now. We have the British Starstreak system went in. And we saw in July that the US announced some NASAMS systems (National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System) that went in.

 

But is that it? If you guys have time I would be interested in your take on what exactly turned the tide in the air war here. Apologies if this topic was previously addressed in some of the posts on here (it is a challenge to read it all).

 

Anyway thanks again for all the hours you put in making sense of this conflict to the extent that you can in the midst of the fog of war.

 

Slava Ukraini!

Hello there and welcome  

And as of your question - Ukraine has the the most numerous, while a bit outdated, air defence forces in Europe, just after Russia. Exact numbers are of course unknown, and they suffered some losses, however Wikipedia will show you at least the ballpark numbers:

Name	Origin	Type	In service	Notes
SAM
2K12 Kub[61]	Soviet Union	mobile SAM system	89	M3/2D variants used
9K37M1 Buk	Soviet Union	mobile SAM system	72[2]
9K330 Tor	Soviet Union	mobile SAM system	100[62]
S-125 Neva/Pechora[63]	Soviet Union	mobile SAM system	8[64]
S-300PS,PT,PMU[63]	Soviet Union	mobile SAM system	250[2][65]	S-300PMU battery donated by Slovakia in 2022.[66]

This means that the entirety of the country is densely covered with SAMs, and going in at medium or high altitude is simply not possible without comprehensive, western style SEAD campaign. Hugging the ground might be possible but is risky and not a suitable way to conduct a thorough air offensive at all. Add to that crappy equipment and training of russian air force and you have your answer right here

For last months all the russians were doing was tossing unguided rockets from a safe distance, which is extremely ineffective. They started doing bombing runs in last week or two, and the effect was a noticeable increase in losses - this is not a sustainable MO for them.

The only thing they really can do is launching missiles from safe distance, either difficult to intercept Kh-22, or Kalibrs/ Kh-101 or Kh-555 that hug the ground and are hard to intercept with UA weapons. The best tool to deal with these would be to have own fighters doing CAP in the air, hopefully we'll see it next year.

Edited September 14, 2022 by Huba

[Battlefront.com]

35 minutes ago, The_MonkeyKing said:

Good pic. Accurate hit by the Russians. I am sure the keep hitting until they get the results they are after.

Either that or they were aiming for something in downtown Kyiv and this is just where the missiles landed

Steve

[Cederic]

1 hour ago, Huba said:

Evil bastards, and ruthless.

I live too close to the 617 Squadron memorial at Woodhall Spa to agree.

[Eddy]

This is an interesting read about what the Kharkiv offensive means for the RA as well as internationally

Andriy Zagorodnyuk: How Ukraine’s counteroffensive will affect Russia’s army, future of the war (kyivindependent.com)

 

[RandomCommenter]

Thank you dan/california, hcrof and huba for the answers.

[Battlefront.com]

22 minutes ago, RandomCommenter said:

Hi guys,

Long time lurker, first time poster here. I have been reading these boards since early March and I have to say that this is the single best source on the internet I have found to find out what is actually going on on the ground in Ukraine. I also really respect the way you guys generally keep it civil and the community you have built with things like the laptop for Haiduk. So massive respect to you all from me.

Thanks and a warm welcome!

22 minutes ago, RandomCommenter said:

One question I have, if I may. Something I have not seen a lot of discussion of recently is that early in the war the Ukrainians were terrified of the Russian Air Force. There was a lot of pressure to "close the skies" and a lot of debate about how NATO trying to run a no-fly zone / SEAD mission could easily escalate into war. But we have not heard much recently on this front. The Russian Air Force are absent. My question is, why? What turned the tide?

Some great answers to your question already, but I have a little more to add.

Wars evolve.  If the war is long then the various phases have sufficient time to establish some sort of character to focus on.  Some of them are transient, either because of the conditions specific to that time and place or because the war has moved onto another phase and sometimes things don't carry along with it.

Ukraine's early please for assistance against Russian airpower and close the airspace was based on what was going on at the time.  Namely, Russian aircraft bombing stuff pretty much all over the place and Ukraine's small airforce looking to be nearly snuffed out.  Ukraine, rightly, asked for assistance to change that.  From those requests they received three things:

• prolific amounts of short range anti-air missiles (Stingers, Igla, and Starstreak in particular)
• some larger systems in the form of S-300
• functioning and parts aircraft of various types

Each achieved a separate goal.  The short range stuff has largely kept Russian helicopters and even fixed wing aircraft away from Ukraine's frontlines.  The replacement S-300 helped keep Ukraine's national air defenses, as well as frontline defenses, functional.  The aircraft have allowed the Ukrainian airforce to remain a threat to Russian air dominance.

The Russians lost a LOT of aircraft in the first couple of months of the war.  As a result they adopted survival strategies which, not surprisingly, greatly reduce the effectiveness and range of their attacks.  This and the apparent running out of precision weapons has degraded Russia's air capability to the point where it is, I'd say, a mild annoyance rather than the existential threat Ukraine thought it was back in February and March.

As others have said, lots of books to be written about this topic!

Steve

[G.I. Joe]

31 minutes ago, dan/california said:

There are multiple volumes to be written about how the Ukrainians have kept the Russian air force bottled up, and the info to write most of them is going to be classified until the war ends or well after. The thing I will state briefly is that the Russian air force is just not the the big growling bear we thought it it was. What on paper are pretty good airplanes, in fairly large numbers, have performed far below expectations due to some combination of technical problems, unskilled pilots, and a completely broken system for picking and prioritizing targets. One specific mistake was starting this war with perhaps a tenth, or even less, of the precision guided weapons needed. It is hard to overstate the size of this failure on the course of the war. Pretty clear someone, maybe everyone, stole a lot of money. they have lost this war because of it.

Further to that and the RUSI article @hcrof linked, the seemingly disproportionate number of senior officers among VKS pilots killed or captured so far, and retired pilots called back up, makes me think their refresher training issues may be even worse than the article suggests (i.e. they're only getting enough flight time to keep the most experienced pilots current). Alternately, it may also suggest serious recruitment and retention problems, especially since inadequate refresher training doesn't really explain the old hands called out of retirement...unless the new guys are really badly trained.

One caveat to that is that it takes long enough to train a pilot these days that in some air forces the norm seems to be that new pilots on operational squadrons are already captains (definitely seems to be the case in the RCAF from what I've seen, though lieutenants flying fast jets seems to still be common in the U.S. military).

And welcome aboard, Random Commenter!

Edited September 14, 2022 by G.I. Joe

[The_Capt]

42 minutes ago, RandomCommenter said:

Hi guys,

Long time lurker, first time poster here. I have been reading these boards since early March and I have to say that this is the single best source on the internet I have found to find out what is actually going on on the ground in Ukraine. I also really respect the way you guys generally keep it civil and the community you have built with things like the laptop for Haiduk. So massive respect to you all from me.

 

One question I have, if I may. Something I have not seen a lot of discussion of recently is that early in the war the Ukrainians were terrified of the Russian Air Force. There was a lot of pressure to "close the skies" and a lot of debate about how NATO trying to run a no-fly zone / SEAD mission could easily escalate into war. But we have not heard much recently on this front. The Russian Air Force are absent. My question is, why? What turned the tide?

I know the Ukrainians managed to disperse their fighter jets and miraculously are still flying six months later using highways to take off. So that is one threat. And there is the MANPAD threat and those MANPADs are all over Ukraine now. We have the British Starstreak system went in. And we saw in July that the US announced some NASAMS systems (National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System) that went in.

 

But is that it? If you guys have time I would be interested in your take on what exactly turned the tide in the air war here. Apologies if this topic was previously addressed in some of the posts on here (it is a challenge to read it all).

 

Anyway thanks again for all the hours you put in making sense of this conflict to the extent that you can in the midst of the fog of war.

 

Slava Ukraini!

Only thing I would add beyond the solid replies so far is that Ukraine has a significant - some may say decisive - ISR advantage.  This means that RUAF aircraft are being spotted likely as they are rolling out the hanger doors, or in some cases as they are being prepped.  The multi-layer defence of the UA combined with better C4ISR means the UA can position point defence well ahead of RUAF sorties.

Clearly this is working as has been noted the RUAF is basically doing stand off attacks and almost zero CAS.  There were rumours that the RUAF had been effective in blunting UA offensives but no one ever had any proof of this, nor do the events of the last week and half support the idea. 

My guess is that we have a situation of air parity thru denial right now so both air forces have largely been held back or used in standoff attack roles. Kind of a "if it flies, it dies" parity.  The Western and UA answer is HIMARs and deep strike systems that are basically acting in the role of airpower at increasing ranges.  Russia does not have the same thing, its missiles are largely focused on terror attacks which are more often than not decoupled from operational or tactical objectives. 

[Vanir Ausf B]

Lengthy thread by Shashank Joshi interviewing unnamed "Western official".

https://twitter.com/shashj/status/1570029079704866816

• UA "far more inventive and experimental...it's much more mission command and ...devolved activity taking place that shortens decision-making cycles and allows for greater responsiveness on the battlefield. RA "for some decisions, are still reverting all the way back to Moscow. And back to the front line, which speaks to a lack of agility."
• 20,000 Russians on the Dnieper right bank
• "in strict military terms" the Russian retreat in the east is more of a withdrawal than a collapse.
• Doubles down on the 20,000 Russian KIA number, "we've got some confidence in these figures"

Edited September 14, 2022 by Vanir Ausf B

[Grigb]

1 hour ago, dan/california said:

Russian timing on the dam strike might be very poor, or it might be related to this news. They have effectively divided the pocket right when the AFU are making a push on the southern side. Was this intentional or accidental?

RU denies it. Kisilevka is too important to be taken quetly.

[dan/california]

Time will tell, War Monitor does have episodes of excessive optimism...He is also right a lot.

[Cederic]

War. Ouch.

 

[womble]

49 minutes ago, Huba said:

western style SEAD campaign

It has also been asserted that it's not so much a capability of "western" air forces as it is restricted in the main to USAF elements who train specifically and extensively with specialist equipment in order to prosecute the mission, and even then it's dicey against integrated RU-style AD networks. Russia doesn't possess enough of the specialist equipment (and the Russian versions have some pretty big flaws), and certainly doesn't maintain sufficient training tempo to develop such a capability.

20 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

There were rumours that the RUAF had been effective in blunting UA offensives but no one ever had any proof of this, nor do the events of the last week and half support the idea. 

I got the impression that those rumours were at least as much from the UKR side as from the RUS... Maybe I got the wrong end of the stick. Since those times, though, the UKR troops have had longer to figure out how to ensure MANPAD coverage on the offensive, and Gepard have arrived to provide some mobile AAA. Also, the sheer velocity of the Kharkiv advance will have thoroughly wigged out the RUS target-acquisition loop for CAS.

[Haiduk]

1 hour ago, Huba said:

Hello there and welcome  

And as of your question - Ukraine has the the most numerous, while a bit outdated, air defence forces in Europe, just after Russia. Exact numbers are of course unknown, and they suffered some losses, however Wikipedia will show you at least the ballpark numbers:

Name	Origin	Type	In service	Notes
SAM
2K12 Kub[61]	Soviet Union	mobile SAM system	89	M3/2D variants used
9K37M1 Buk	Soviet Union	mobile SAM system	72[2]
9K330 Tor	Soviet Union	mobile SAM system	100[62]
S-125 Neva/Pechora[63]	Soviet Union	mobile SAM system	8[64]
S-300PS,PT,PMU[63]	Soviet Union	mobile SAM system	250[2][65]	S-300PMU battery donated by Slovakia in 2022.[66]

 

100 TORs? Really?  All Ukranian TORs were from first series of production, so very raw. As far as in 2001 they were decomissioned, because numerous malfunctions and failures. There weren't tech. specialists and parts for repair. Though as I can recall about one battery of TORs were repaired and brought to service again since 2017. At the end of 2018 there were test firings from upgraded TORs and Kubs, there were plans to bring back some number of theese SAMs, but I don't know either this was did or not. I didn't see Kubs in service.

S-125 - likely upgraded version was adopted for Naval forces

Number of S-300 launchers overestimated

PS. Our AD now successfully intercepts most of cruise missiles, including Kh-101 - during Russian strike on Dnipro several days ago all 5 Kh-101 launched to this city were shot down. Main problem are Kh-22, Iskanders and Kinzhals

Edited September 14, 2022 by Haiduk

[Cederic]

Sometimes you maybe can't trust the subtitles.

 

[Haiduk]

18 minutes ago, Cederic said:

Sometimes you maybe can't trust the subtitles.

 

Subs are not corresponded to his speech. Likely mistake.

[Huba]

Soo, more on German tanks. The lady seems to be doing a great work indeed:

So about "joint decision on MBTs", perhaps my idea of all Leopard 2 operators chipping in a battalion or so wasn't that crazy? I don't see how else would that work, unless they just want a pat on the back  

[Grigb]

It is possible that UKR just started a new phase of offensive at Kupyansk-Lyman-Lysichansk area. Tatarsky reports

Quote

The situation on the Oskil front. The enemy is trying to probe our defenses all the way from Chervonyi Oskil to Lisichansk. Large enemy forces, supported by artillery, are trying to attack one or another area. They act competently, the Izum warriors are holding on, but the situation is very tense. The Ukrainians are rushing from all sides, attacking from Svyatohirsk and Kupyansk, attacking with large forces. Apparently, right now Kiev has introduced almost all reserves.

Edited September 14, 2022 by Grigb

[Haiduk]

Russian newest Kinzhal missile, crashed in Stavropol' region after launch