Ukraine War

Ukraine: A De Facto No Fly Zone For Russia?

New tactics, new weapons — how has Ukraine achieved it?

Ukraine has denied Russia naval access to much of the western Black Sea having sunk an estimated 40% of their Black Sea Fleet’s tonnage since February 2022.

According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Russia has lost approximately 40% of its naval tonnage in the Black Sea since February 2022. (https://t.me/United24media/18467)

Ukraine now seems to achieved the impossible. It has made its full internationally-recognised territory a no fly zone for Russian military aircraft.

Ukraine’s takedown of a priceless (well, $385 million) Russian Beriev A50 AWACS plane on January 14, 2024 was a shock to military aviation specialists. After that Russia had six of them left. Then I went away to sea for several weeks and came back to the announcement by President Zelenskyy that Ukraine’s armed forces has destroyed 15 Russian planes during the February and the first couple of days of March.

It was my turn to be shocked.

One of those aircraft was another Beriev A50 AWACS, shot down over Krasnodar Krai. That’s about 180 km from the nearest front line north of Mariupol.

Five A50s left. Fleet grounded. There are reports that the A50 damaged in Belarus last year has been repaired with cannibalized parts. Russia has no capacity to build new aircraft of this type as they date back to USSR days.

The other aircraft taken down/damaged on the ground include Sukhoi Su-34s and Su-35s.

And it’s still ongoing.

How?

At 180 km, the ground zero of the destroyed A-50 is just outside the declared Patriot PAC2 range of 99 miles (160 km) from the nearest Ukrainian front line near Mariupol. Clearly, Russia believed that the patrol plan was beyond reach of Ukraine air defences, specifically the Patriots.

There are suggestions that this latest A50 event was the result of the use of S-200 (SAM 5 Gammon) missiles which have a range of over 300 km. No doubt these will have been upgraded by Ukraine’s engineers.

The takedown of the A50 was video-ed by several observers as it dropped heat-traps (flares) and at least on missile was ‘fooled’ by these flares. But one other did get through.

A modified S-200 is suspected of having been used to against Russian ground targets in July 2023.

It has also been reported that these large 7.5 ton missiles were used in an attack on the Kerch Bridge. (BBC)

These missiles are usually deployed in fixed formations to protect key infrastructure. That makes their launch sites vulnerable and the radar that they use to illuminate targets makes them relatively easy prey for anti-radiation missiles. Of course Ukraine could have re-engineered several of these aspects to make them semi-transportable.

The A50 AWACS provides long range radar information on Ukrainian ground and air forces, and the grounding of these aircraft (which are required to cover the whole of Russia’s vast borders) is a serious loss and will further hamper the safe (!) operation of Russian military aviation near Ukraine’s borders.

The numerous other destroyed planes will likely have been hit by Patriot PAC-2 batteries and perhaps S-200s as the Patriots are usually kept well back from the front lines.

If the S-200s were really used successfully then this will be of huge concern to Russia as the technology is known to them and the A-50 should be immune to such threats.

New weapons?

This is a tantalising question that has been floated. Ukraine has a tremendous technological skillbase and its aerospace industry was a mainstay of the USSR defence industry. Ukraine’s engineers have now been exposed to Patriot, Iris-T and SAMP-T technology — although not all of it will have been accessible to them (much of it will be fitted with anti-tamper devices and software and also subject to formal agreemtns with the state suppliers). Could they copy/enhance any of that equipment ?

The reality

Since February, the Ukrainian military has been destroying enemy combat aircraft almost every day. Mostly these are Su-34 and Su-35 aircraft…

…One of the Russian Su-34s was downed by the Ukrainian military yesterday in the eastern direction. After that, Russian aircraft stopped flying into the Ukrainian sky for several hours.

However, according to Illia Yevlash, the head of the press service of the Khortytsia Joint Operation Center, even after the destruction of so many planes, the Russians do not stop using aircraft to strike the front. Although they are changing their tactics. RBC Ukraine

For Russia, the loss of their AWACS capability is huge, but more so the fact that their aircraft are clearly vulnerable when flying well within their own legal airspace. They will adapt their tactics no doubt, but within greater limitations. Their ability to replace these aircraft is severely constrained, and the pilots equally so.

For Ukraine, the greater flexibility to operate without the threat of Russian aircover supporting the Russian troops is a great benefit and may offset the increasing threat that Russian gliding bombs have recently become.

Russia’s latest aircraft losses are unprecedented in modern times, but however Ukraine has achieved them, it will surely have a significant impact on the near future of this war.

There is hope yet that more aid will be forthcoming from the US this Spring as Ukraine builds to what will surely be another summer offensive, supported this year, I hope, by F-16 aircraft.

This is all amid signs that North Korea has stopped supplies of artillery ammunition to Russia, possibly due to production problems in attempting to replace the 70 years old high-failure shells already sent.