Since the second Russian invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, the Ukrainian military has been able to stifle Russian manned aircraft strikes, but that deterrence may not hold without continued aid from the United States in niche areas, such as long-range missile attack, an analyst cautioned during last month’s U.S.-Ukraine Security Dialogue in Washington, D.C.
The Russian Aerospace Forces (VKS) “was 10 times the size of Ukraine’s at the start of the war and also more technologically advanced,” said Kelly Grieco, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center.
“If Russia were able to unleash the full power of the VKS, I think it would change the course of the war dramatically and make it much harder for Ukraine to hold onto the territory that it has,” she said. “Some of this has had to do with Russian ineptitude in that the Russians failed early on to conduct a suppression of enemy air defense campaign. They did make an attempt, but they didn’t really follow up on that.”
“But I don’t think that’s really the story here,” Grieco said. “I actually think it’s much more about Ukraine making some very smart strategy choices early on in the war. They have practiced a strategy of air denial to limit or deny the other side from achieving air superiority. You may not be able to achieve air superiority yourself, but you’re able to deny that air superiority to the other side to keep the air space contested. This is what Ukraine has done in two ways—maintaining a ‘fleet in being’ with its mobile ground-based air defenses and conducting ground-based air attacks through things like drones or long-range air strikes, even on Russian soil.”
Mobile air defense systems are hard to pinpoint, as the U.S. discovered during its failed attempts to find Iraqi mobile Scud launchers during Operation Desert Storm in 1991, and Ukraine has had an effective “volumetric” air defense at different ranges and altitudes, she said, including the use of mobile RTX [RTX] TPY-2 radars that Russian fighters flew low to try to locate, thus putting themselves within the scope of man-portable air defense systems.
“Layers of air defense is really important, especially moving forward,” Grieco said. “This is still contested, and I think the best evidence of that is the Russians largely avoid entering Ukrainian airspace. To the extent they use airpower, it’s often lobbing bombs into Ukraine so air denial is still largely intact, but it is very much under strain. The problem with air denial is that it is a costly strategy in that it tends to turn this into a battle of attrition in the air. Looking at open source data, the ratio of losses is about 2 to 1 Ukraine to Russia in air defense systems.” Ukraine has seen a higher loss of longer-range systems, as Russia has targeted them from its own territory, while Russia has absorbed a disproportionate loss in shorter range systems.
Ukraine has a small number of RTX MIM-104 Patriot air defense systems, and a Patriot missile production line may open in Schrobenhausen, Germany. Europe has provided shorter-range IRIS-T and NASAMS and one medium-range Surface-to-Air Missile Platform/Terrain (SAMP/T) battery to Ukraine.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said last month that Europe must provide the “disproportionate share” of future weapons aid to Ukraine (Defense Daily, Feb. 12).