A French analysis of Russian air power in action in Ukraine that I translate:
Air power with non-determining effects
The war in Ukraine remains primarily a land confrontation in which naval and air power are "adjuvants" but are not in themselves decisive on the fate of the weapons. At first sight, with more than 300 combat aircraft and as many helicopters deployed, often quite modern, the Russian aerospace forces (the VKS) had the resources to weigh in the conflict, facing a Ukrainian air force with barely a hundred aircraft and AD systems that were not only well known to the Russians but also ageing. This was not the case, except for the salvos of stand-off missile strikes, which had no coercive effect.
In fact, despite occasional peaks of 200-300 sorties per day during the siege of Mariupol or the push against Donbass in May, Russian air activity averaged 140 sorties/day from late February to October (or 34,000 sorties, a volume equivalent to the Russian air campaign in Syria). According to Tom Cooper, an air warfare specialist, they even fell to 120 in December 2022 and would stagnate today at around 100 despite the launch of the Russian offensive. According to the estimate given by the RUSI in a remarkable study of November 2022, this is just the number needed to cover Ukrainian space in one day. Knowing that part of the sorties counted are necessarily dedicated to close support and interdiction, the VKS are therefore far below the minimum activity required. Their posture is in fact very largely defensive, even passive or anaemic.
1. Russians fail to establish air superiority
For a year, the air environment has been the object of an active and relentless confrontation between the two belligerents, a fragile balance that the Ukraine has managed to achieve by its intelligent challenge of the overwhelming Russian numerical and technical advantage in this area. Dispersal of means, "shoot and scoot" procedures for DA batteries, low-level and night flights below radar coverage, summary but effective strikes on Russian air bases, courage, innovation and tenacity...: the Ukrainians exploited to the maximum all known procedures to make their fighter and anti-aircraft systems a credible threat to the precious modernised aircraft of the Russian fleet. The Ukrainian air force is too weak to defeat its adversary, but it was able to take it by surprise, inflict constant attrition, restrict its freedom of action and finally dissuade it from engaging too deeply in its airspace, thus repeating the concept of "Fleet in being" dear to the sailors.
As described by RUSI, at the beginning of the war, the VKS ventured up to 300 kilometres into Ukrainian territory, managing to neutralise Ukrainian defences through electronic warfare and hit around 100 targets. However, by March 2022, they were forced to retreat behind their front line and even to operate only within the Federation's borders. The attrition of the Russian air superiority fleet appears negligible (less than ten Su-30SM and Su-35S shot down out of a fleet of about 250 aircraft of these types) to justify such a withdrawal. These losses, which affected the most modern Russian fighters, took the VKS, who considered their opponents incapable of mounting any resistance, by surprise. After the initial disappointment, the Russians demonstrated a capacity for tactical adaptation, in terms of aircraft armament, composition of their formations (introduction of Mig-31BMs and formation of pairs of Su-30SMs and Su-35Ss for the neutralisation of anti-aircraft defences (Suppression of Enemy Air Defence, SEAD) and flight profiles (night, low altitude), but they were never able to increase their power significantly to establish real air superiority.
How can such an inability be explained? In fact, this posture seems to be the product not only of the effects of the Ukrainian resistance but also of a very imperfect modernisation of the Russian air arm, which has only partially succeeded in upgrading its material capabilities, and which has above all failed to reform its modes of action, its procedures, and its thinking itself.
The withdrawal of the VKS to a safe distance denotes a return by default to a position of comfort, i.e. to the Soviet conception of air operations. In this scheme, air superiority is understood as fire superiority achieved in the air. The difference is not only semantic. It implies that aviation is only an additional strike vector, which certainly has specific characteristics and its own techniques, but which does not in itself justify that it be considered in an autonomous way in relation to the whole of the operations or to the rules of the operational art which are above all terrestrial. In this way, air superiority is first and foremost a joint effort that does not necessarily fall primarily to the air forces themselves, and, consequently, it is not justified as an attempt to control a manoeuvring space ("Master of the Air") but as an effort to saturate and envelop the adversary by fire. From this perspective, air superiority, and air interdiction in particular, is akin to counter-battery action against similar adversary capabilities. The air force is therefore, on the one hand, only a complementary firepower to the ballistic arsenal for deep strikes against C2s, airfields, strategic anti-aircraft systems, an arsenal considered more reliable and penetrating than the air force; on the other hand, it is a complement to the Russian anti-aircraft defences, whose protection must be ensured and whose dead spots must be compensated. Concretely, in hierarchical terms, the air and anti-aircraft armies did not have their own theatre of operations but were part of the Military District plan, whose command was in fact, if not in law, a land-based one. In fact, despite great ambitions before the war, especially in a strategic role, the Russian air force did not succeed in overcoming this condition of airborne artillery, having to evolve strictly at a safe distance within the 'firing range' or 'bastion' that the ground-air defence provided.
Such a design has made the VKS structurally unprepared for classic Western air power missions. This is the case of the SEAD. In the Russian logic, it appears contradictory to oppose anti-aircraft systems with aircraft against which they were designed. The Russians therefore prefer to use gun and rocket artillery, the missile arsenal as well as electronic warfare to pierce "air corridors" allowing the introduction of aviation. The purely air dimension of the Russian SEAD thus appears as a last resort, either from a safe distance in addition to the ground salvo (which presupposes good integration), or in a tactical and ad hoc manner, to ensure the self-protection of the aircraft once they have been engaged and to enable them to reach their objectives. The Russians have therefore not developed a specific concept of operations for SEAD nor have they developed complex training to conduct it, the latter consisting mainly of reactive SEAD and defensive aircraft countermeasures.
Finally, technically, the Russians have never designed specialised aircraft for this mission. They have favoured the development of high-performance missiles for stand-off firing from their heavy carriers (Tu-160, Tu-95, Tu-22), allowing them to upgrade these (old) platforms and to maintain a large stock of unguided and less expensive bombs and rockets for the Su-27 derivatives (Su-30, 35, 34). Admittedly, the Russians have responded by arming their Su-30SM and Su-35S with powerful Kh-31P and Kh-58 anti-radar missiles, which have caused serious losses among Ukrainian tactical air defence systems, but the aircraft themselves were primarily designed for an interception role. They do not have sufficiently capable target designation systems to complement their radar to hit moving targets. This situation makes the Su-34 the only aircraft that is sufficiently modern and versatile, in terms of sensors, night capabilities and arsenal carried (bombs and missiles) to carry out SEAD but also interdiction missions and even close air support. Its status as a "Swiss Army knife" forces the Russians to use it primarily to make up for the deficit in ground firepower rather than devoting it to air superiority. As a result, it suffered significant losses (twenty aircraft, 15% of the fleet), caused in particular by its indiscriminate use at very low altitude to replace the Su-25.
Indeed, these shortcomings paradoxically force these aircraft to fly at lower altitudes, within range of the Ukrainian short-range ground-air defence. Alternatively, they force the VKS to over-consume their ballistic and cruise missile arsenal as they do now. Reports of Ukrainian anti-aircraft batteries being destroyed by Toshka-U and Iskander surface missiles thus appear credible: lacking aviation and artillery range, they are the only means sufficiently responsive, accurate and powerful to strike in tactical and operational depth.
