9 ms·

Somewhat ridiculous piece. Ukraine, 4 years after, still operates a significant number of jets it entered the war with. This is despite hundreds of attempts to

• virtue3 6mo ago
  That is totally false. They have been getting replacement MiG-29s and Su-25s from allies and are starting to use f-16s from NATO nations. "A coalition of NATO countries, primarily the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, and Belgium, are providing F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine. The United States authorized the transfer and is providing training and spare parts, with deliveries having begun in 2024 to strengthen Ukraine's air force against Russia." So yes, they still have an airforce. They're just getting re-supplied. Also the Ukrainian airforce was ULTRA conservative about sorties to make sure they conserved as many fighters as possible.
  • BobbyJo 6mo ago
    "A significant number of jets it entered the war with" does not mean they haven't also gotten newer jets.
    • nickff 6mo ago
      From looking at the sources below, it looks like Ukraine still has about 1/3 of the fighter aircraft it started the war with, though it started with many non-serviceable units (seems that at least 20 aircraft were non-operational), and received many parts from abroad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_warfare_in_the_Russo-Ukrainian_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_warfare_in_the_Russo-Uk... https://aerospaceglobalnews.com/news/how-many-aircraft-losses-russia-ukraine/ https://aerospaceglobalnews.com/news/how-many-aircraft-losse... I am not sure what is meant by 'a significant number of', and I'm not sure if all commenters have a common definition of that phrase, so I'm unable to judge the veracity of the comments above.
    • dmix 6mo ago
      Pretty sure almost all of the functional ones were destroyed or were kept in such reserve for security they weren't being used.
      • greedo 6mo ago
        They're still flying SU-27 frequently, and those weren't replaced by donations.
      • varjag 6mo ago
        No there are still tens of original UAF jets that by now clocked thousands of sorties. Sometimes they get shot down or otherwise lost and we get photographic evidence (tail number, sometimes even pre-war colors) that it's one of the OGs.
• TheOtherHobbes 6mo ago
  No one was going to launch mass strikes on Moscow. Russian nuclear doctrine would have treated that as an existential threat. The psychology of Ukraine's drone campaign as a response to Russia's original drone launches is very interesting. It's a classic boiling frog move. Drones are seen as an improvised amateur threat. Unlike a bombing campaign, which is seen as "proper war", drones are an annoyance. They're fragile, cheap, unglamorous, unsophisticated, easy to shoot down, and wasteful, because you need tens or hundreds to make sure a few get through. That gives drone campaigns a huge advantage. You can do a lot of damage and your enemy doesn't quite get what's happening. Psychologically, there's a Rubicon-level difference between someone dropping bombs on Leningrad from a plane and a drone swarm attacking the same targets. In practice the threat level is similar. Drones have absolutely become an existential threat to Russia. But psychologically, they're not seen as such.
  • cineticdaffodil 6mo ago
    I dont buy that anymore. We had that "escalation" yell at every stage, every new tech. Tanks, jets, everytime ukraine got help, the "moscow puppets" yelled about nuclear war and escalation. I m of the opinion we could have stopped 4 years of butchery if we had supported Ukraine decisevly from the start. The words of the peaceniks just dont hold value anymore. They lack predictive power so significantly those utterances seem delusional at time. Quite frankly if sb marches into a peaceful neighbor country, they dont get to call for the referee the moment they kick the shit out of them.
    • tim333 6mo ago
      I basically agree and think it's a great shame that the US didn't say don't invade Ukraine or we'll have the USAF bomb the invading troops. Russia couldn't reasonably use nukes just because they were being stopped invading a country that they'd signed an agreement not to invade when Ukraine gave up its nukes. Many thousands or lives would have been saved.
  • ceejayoz 6mo ago
    > Russian nuclear doctrine would have treated that as an existential threat. They claimed that with basically every little sprinkle of new aid for like two years, until everyone realized it was a bluff. Putin is many things, but actively suicidal looks like a no.
• cyberax 6mo ago
  Neither Ukraine nor Russia are using manned aircraft in any significant ways. They are at most used to lob gliding bombs from far behind the front lines. > And naturally F-35s on that theatre would have been a game changer making mass strikes on Moscow possible. And then what? Kyiv has been under relentless strikes from drones and missiles for 5 years. And Moscow was hit by Ukrainian drones several times. You'll need to suppress all the anti-air defenses first, and it will likely be too costly.
  • morkalork 6mo ago
    It's like watching salami slicing happen in real time. It also forces a dilemma on Russia. Every move of GBAD to Moscow to defend against drone leaves an airfield uncovered. Move some to airfields and it leaves a refinery open. And on and on.
    • m4rtink 6mo ago
      And at the same time, drones are eating the AD every day, with videos of multiple strikes often coming out on a single day. Most in Crimea, but now more often also elsewhere. An it shows with how the drone attacks on oil ports, refineries a even on navy ships in harbor have been successful lately.
  • varjag 6mo ago
    > They are at most used to lob gliding bombs from far behind the front lines. You write that, and literally quote my point about F-35 making deep strikes against dense air defense possible in the very next sentence.
    • cyberax 6mo ago
      It remains to be seen how well F-35s actually perform in that role against an adversary with modern anti-air defense and with modern drone-based tactics. Both Russia and Ukraine learned to avoid concentrating forces, so what are you going to strike? Use an F-35 to attack a single Jeep with a mounted machine gun? F-35 has limited range and carries very limited armament, so you can't just carpet-bomb everything. At some point, you'll need to use much less survivable heavy bombers.
• expedition32 6mo ago
  The US not going full in on drones reminds me of the British ridiculing submarines. The Chinese are going to spam literally MILLIONS of drones all over the Pacific...
  • wredcoll 6mo ago
    I don't know if you've looked recently, but the pacific is, likev pretty big. Maybe even bigger than that. The primary problem with killing carriers is, has been, and will be, finding the things.[1] Drone strikes on oil refineries work because, with few exceptions, the refineries rarely move. You can literally program a drone to go x miles in a specific direction and then drop a bomb. It's also considerably harder to hide things like drones in big empty spaces. If loitering drones became a serious threat (as opposed to the, you know, literally super sonic missiles the navy has spent the last 40 years planning for) itms pretty easy to imagine anti-drone planes/ships/drones sweeping a large radius around your carriers. [1] Satellites can definitely do things, but they're not magical and people can track where they're looking and just... sail in a different direction. Also if someone was actually using satellites to target american carriers with munitions the americans would probably just destroy the satellites.
    • phainopepla2 6mo ago
      > Satellites can definitely do things, but they're not magical and people can track where they're looking and just... sail in a different direction I know nothing about this really, so forgive my ignorance. Assuming a carrier is found and tracked by a satellite in the ocean, how could it possibly escape the satellite's detection before being targeted by a drone or some other type of munition? If the ship starts sailing in a different direction, the people (or AI) tracking via satellite would notice and adjust, right?
      • foota 6mo ago
        I don't believe parent is right, but satelites don't stay in one place unless they're on the equator, because otherwise they have to be moving. This means that you need many satelites to maintain coverage of a single spot. I don't know how many military satelites China has, but I would have assumed it would be sufficient to cover the pacific sufficiently to find an aircraft carrier. (the obvious caveat here being clouds, which are fairly common over the ocean)
• sobellian 6mo ago
  The thing about the Russo-Ukrainian war is that it is a failure for both sides. The primary lesson from this war is, how do we avoid ending up like those poor guys? If the US Army fights a war with anyone, let alone China, on the doctrine that it should set up a static attritional front line with drone warfare, the joint chiefs should all be fired.
  • peterfirefly 6mo ago
    Don't have Germany be so dependent on Russian gas. Don't tear down nuclear power plants, build more of them instead.
    • hedora 6mo ago
      Electrifying the economy with renewables (and I’ll count nuclear as renewable) is the single most important thing countries can do right now to ensure their own military and economic security. Distributed solar and wind are more difficult to bomb than nuclear, so they’re probably a slightly better choice (especially if they’re built to island / work off grid).
      • peterfirefly 6mo ago
        Non-nuclear renewables ("intermittables") need something else as back up. That is almost always natural gas. That's been causing a lot of problems for Europe for years now. There's the dependence on Russia, there's the dependence on the North Sea supply -- and the full-scale invasion started while the Danish fields were off-line -- and there's the dependency on LNG imports from actors that are either unreliable (the US) or far away (the US and Qatar) or both. LNG is also quite expensive.
        • hedora 6mo ago
          Batteries help a lot. So do things like hydro and nuclear. Of course, they also stretch strategic reserves.
  • 8note 6mo ago
• isubasinghe 6mo ago
  Hmm, this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aviation_shootdowns_and_accidents_during_the_Russo-Ukrainian_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aviation_shootdowns_an... indicates what the author said is true. The majority of these losses are on the ground.
• moralestapia 6mo ago
  >mass strikes on Moscow Oh yeah, I'd like to see you try that. Maduro was a clown. Iran is two orders of magnitude above Venezuela and the US (plus friends) are already struggling. Russia is at least one order of magnitude above Iran. I have no doubt that the US would win at the end, but at a massive cost of life and money. You cannot afford that, you cannot even afford a 1/10th of that. I live in America, I'm obviously pro-America, but losing touch with reality will only make things worse. The world is not like your RTS games.
  • 8note 6mo ago
    the world is getting close to being an rts though. real time top down view everywhere all at once, but with commands and targets being set with a ton of parallelism - many rts players at once picking who to send where for the same team
• NooneAtAll3 6mo ago
  Ukraine fighters are operating out of long-term soviet-era reinforced concrete hangars, while transport aviation is operating out of Romania and Poland which makes striking them a political issue both solutions are a lot less relevant in case of USA remote-from-home conflicts
  • varjag 6mo ago
    It's too bad the USA found itself without allies to stow their transports to. How did that happen, was it F-35? Yeah, it has to be F-35 to blame.
• red-iron-pine 6mo ago
  ukraine has planes because it can't fly them except in limited circumstances with limited objectives.