Russian military jets fly over Moscow during a military parade – ANSA
Before February 24, the Russian Air Force was fearsome everywhere. After ten months of war, it’s just a shadow of its former self. Even with the latest jets, it’s encountering difficulties, being sidelined and increasingly threatened, undermined by Western anti-aircraft defenses pouring into Kyiv.
Oryxblog, an excellent intelligence site, has been documenting the war losses of the two adversaries for months: the Russians have complained about it countless times. They have already left behind 68 modern airplanes and 74 modern helicopters. A massacre that does not stop at precious assets like the Sukhoi-34, the backbone of their aviation. These deadly planes in Syria cost $50 million each. There is nothing wrong with them on paper.
The fact that Moscow lost 26% of the total troops deployed is impressive, also because many killings are the result of Ukrainian hunting, which continues to fly with impunity. A fact that surprised many. In the wars of the past twenty years, NATO has annihilated aerial threats in a matter of days, attacking with waves of hundreds of jets simultaneously without allowing any respite.
The Russians never succeeded. And yet they have it all: aircraft galore (1,517) and operational doctrines that require jets to protect troops on the ground as best as possible. So why this debacle?
The causes are many, beginning with an order that is unable to weigh up where it matters. Not even one of his officers appears in the organization chart of the Russian military leadership. Putin is the cause of this. In 2017, he appointed an infantry officer to head the Aerospace Forces: Sergei Surovikin, who made headlines for commanding the expeditionary force in Ukraine since October.
Surovikin may be familiar with tanks and infantry, but he’s unfamiliar with the complexities of modern aviation. And indeed he treated it with arrogance and neglected the education of the people. And maybe that’s why yesterday he was torpedoed in favor of Gerasimov, remaining only his deputy.
So the prepared pilots gradually disappeared into thin air. They don’t train properly: they fly less than 100 hours a year compared to the minimum 180 hours NATO guarantees its pilots. And if you exercise little, you lose familiarity with airplanes. For the British Rusi, the Russians also lack experts in integrated flight operations. The country does not conduct complex exercises with equal rights foreigners. Its recent wars, without a hitch, have not filled the voids of an air force that has never before engaged in threat-ridden conflicts. An unimaginable handicap among the NATO countries, which are always busy with maneuvers.
To save itself from the Ukrainian catastrophe, the Kremlin also had the brilliant idea of sending the few experienced pilots at its disposal, aged and abruptly removed from training schools, to the front. The machine has jammed. He will not be able to prepare new students, who are becoming increasingly scarce. In 2015, 1,300 were missing, including pilots, engineers and technicians. A deficit that is difficult to fill in the short term, also because these profiles are not fascinating, are snubbed and underpaid by the hierarchs.