Delay in US Military Aid Allowed Russians to Dominate Ukraine’s Skies. What Will Change With F-16 Jets Going Into Combat | Analyze

Even if the promised aid from the US and Europe is sent quickly, it may not reach the front lines for several weeks, giving Russia a window of opportunity to take advantage of.

With the front lines barely moving over the past year, the air war has begun to have a greater impact, with Russia bombing cities and infrastructure deep inside Ukraine. In April, Russia destroyed the largest power plant in the Kiev region. According to the most pessimistic estimates, Ukraine’s power plants lost 85% of their generating potential due to Russian bombing in March and April.

Russian missiles and drones have a bigger impact

Although Russia has not significantly increased the number of drones and missiles used in airstrikes since September 2023, they have had a greater impact because Ukrainian forces have been unable to intercept them.

An analysis by the US think tank Institute for the Study of War (ISW) finds that Ukraine has increasingly failed since March 22 to intercept even half of Russian missiles.

Russian bombardments now include a combined package of cruise missiles, drones and ballistic missiles to overwhelm Ukraine’s overstretched air defenses.

While Shahed drones can be shot down by squads of mobile units firing machine guns and shoulder-launched artillery from the back of pickup trucks, the missiles—the fastest of which fly at ten times the speed of sound—can be countered only with more sophisticated weaponry.

Moscow has also begun using cruise missiles equipped with decoy-launching technology to deflect Ukrainian missiles that follow the heat signature of their targets to strike them.

Change in tactics: The Russians are dropping more and more guided bombs into the battle

Another significant tactical development by Russia is the increased use of guided bombs, which has increased 16 times compared to last year. They are converted from the many Soviet-era bombs already in Russia’s inventory, which, once upgraded with wings and guidance systems, can fly 40 miles (65 kilometers) after being launched from aircraft behind the front line.

They proved their effectiveness when Russia captured the town of Avdiivka in the Donetsk region in February. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitro Kuleba said Russia launched 700 guided bombs in a six-day period after March 18, shortly after a Russian Iskander missile destroyed two Patriot batteries.

These tactics have forced Kiev to make difficult decisions about where to deploy its limited resources.

“We saw that as the shortages worsened, Ukraine had to allocate a large portion of its air defense resources to protecting large population centers behind” the front line, said ISW analyst Riley Bailey. for The Moscow Times.

“This means that much of the front line is underserved or has no air defenses at all. This allows the Russian tactical aviation to carry out guided bomb attacks, which are not accurate, but which en masse cause widespread destruction in the Ukrainian lines,” he explained.

In Russia’s first response after the House of Representatives passed a $61 billion aid bill, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu vowed to step up attacks on Western logistics centers and weapons depots in Ukraine. Riley said the time needed to rebuild Ukraine’s air defenses could give Russia a window to step up its attacks.

It is still unclear whether the US will deliver another Patriot air defense battery to Ukraine, after only sending one so far. Germany, which has already delivered two of its 12 Patriot systems to Ukraine, has pledged to send one more unit, and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte has offered to buy Patriot batteries from countries reluctant to part with them.

These systems are crucial for Ukraine because they can fire munitions capable of intercepting Russia’s hypersonic missiles, which have slipped through Ukraine’s air defense net with particularly high success rates.

Ukraine’s head of diplomacy, Dmitro Kubela, said negotiations currently underway for four more units were complicated by countries wanting “compensations” for their donation.

“I think the US military probably has a spare,” he said.

But these systems will be insufficient to build a defensive umbrella over all of Ukraine, the largest country located entirely in Europe. Analysts say Ukraine will be better able to protect its cities and soldiers if it can strike targets in Russia and the occupied territories.

Washington has long expressed reluctance to send Ukraine weapons capable of hitting targets on Russian soil, for fear of escalating the war.

But in the week before the aid bill was passed, the US secretly sent long-range ATACMS missiles to Ukraine, which can fly up to 300 kilometers, and Kiev used them to hit troops in the city occupied Ukrainian Berdiansk, located on the coast of the Sea of ​​Azov.

Ukraine has also previously used long-range weaponry, such as UK-supplied Storm Shadow missiles, to push the Russian Black Sea Fleet out of Ukrainian waters and destroy submarines that launched missiles into the country. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said on Tuesday that his country would supply more such missiles to Ukraine.

What impact will the F-16s have?

This fear of escalating war has led Washington to wait until August 2023 to allow Kiev’s allies to donate US F-16 fighter jets to cover Ukrainian ground forces and bolster the country’s air defenses.

While President Zelenski welcomed Denmark and the Netherlands’ commitment to be the first countries to donate F-16s to Ukraine, describing it as a “groundbreaking deal”, other voices were more cautious. US officials have said privately that the F-16s would not be a major game-changer on the frontline because Russia has strong air defenses and electronic warfare systems that could interfere with the planes’ radar.

“If Ukraine’s F-16s can survive Russia’s air defenses and conduct successful reconnaissance, they could force Russian jets dropping guided bombs on Kharkiv, as well as Ukrainian soldiers, further away from the front line, where the effective range of these weapons will be reduced,” Reserve Marshal Edward Stringer, who served as director-general of the Inter-Armed Forces Development Command, Britain’s Strategic Command, told the Russian publication.

Stringer also said that while the delivery of the F-16s was the right decision, they may be less effective over Ukraine than in other NATO missions, where they are deployed as part of a package with other NATO aircraft to support them.

Even if these obstacles can be overcome, Ukraine would still be dependent on the US and Europe, which manufacture and supply expensive air-to-air missiles.

The situation in Kharkiv

Kharkiv is only 30 kilometers from Ukraine’s border with Russia, making the city particularly vulnerable to missile and drone attacks. Air raid sirens became an inevitable part of life for the city’s 1.3 million residents – about half the pre-war population – who opened schools and even an underground ballet theatre.

Residents only have electricity for a few hours a day after Russia destroyed the three power plants that supply the city. Russia has begun timing its attacks to coincide with these power outages, forcing residents to anxiously wait for cellphone signals to resume in order to contact loved ones.

Ukrainian officials have expressed concern that Russia is stepping up its bombing of Kharkiv, as well as its propaganda, to make the city uninhabitable. Russian officials have signaled their intention to create a buffer zone along Ukraine’s northern border.

Ada Wordsworth, head of the NGO KHARPP, which supports villages in the Kharkiv region, says people were relieved to hear that additional US support was on the way.

“But that relief comes with quite a bit of resentment because of the long delay and the number of lives — civilian and military — that have been lost,” she said.

“There is also limited hope for the impact this funding will have on protecting the skies over cities like Kharkiv, which are so close to the Russian border, unless Ukraine it is allowed to use these weapons to strike Russian territory,” she added, given that Washington has announced it does not support attacking Russian targets.

“Europe missed the geostrategic moment two years ago”

Whether Kiev’s allies can continue to supply weapons to Ukraine depends largely on their ability to manufacture expensive equipment.

Despite international sanctions, Russia has managed to obtain millions of munitions from North Korea and Iran, strengthen its domestic production and refurbish older equipment. Although Ukraine fired more artillery than Russia in the summer of 2023, aid delays and relatively strong Russian production allow Moscow’s forces to fire six shells for every shell Ukraine can fire.

“I think Europe missed its geostrategic moment two years ago,” Stringer told The Moscow Times.

“If our leaders had the proper depth and seriousness of thought, they would have looked at our defense industrial base and accelerated our own production. I think the fact that they recognized that there is a problem, but did nothing to solve it, makes the situation worse,” he added.

Photo: Profimedia Images

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