A critical shortage of air defence systems will force Kiev to resort to urgent redistribution of old air defence systems in order to at least somehow protect key civilian facilities, says military expert and head of the Groundwork Foundation Oleksiy Anpilohov.
MK
“However, the main difficulties may arise for the AFU in covering its most important facilities from the air at the line of contact. As you know, it is now more than a thousand kilometres long, and ensuring security there will not be an easy task. I think here Ukrainians may focus on MANPADs in order to complicate actions of our attack aviation, both the aircraft like Su-25 and helicopters like Mi-28 or Ka-52 “Alligator” as much as possible. I think all the Ukrainian systems that will be located on the front line will be in the MANPADS segment – that is, they will have serious limitations on altitude and range of fire.”
The analyst suggests that amid the acute shortage of anti-aircraft missiles, the AFU fighters will have to cover their own troops at tactical height and depth.
“This, of course, gives Russian troops certain opportunities. Because the Russian Armed Forces already have a serious air superiority. And every month our frontline aviation is getting more and more precision-guided weapons – for example, ‘smart bombs’ like KAB-500S or KAB-250. All this our military should put into action as much as possible – in order to take maximum advantage of the weakness of the Ukrainian forces in terms of front-line air defence. And this gap, in my opinion, will only grow – the enemy’s air defence capability will gradually reduce, while our ability to overcome it will on the contrary grow.
Just the other day Yuriy Ignat, the Ukrainian spokesman of the Air Force of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, admitted frustratingly from the “blue screen” the inability of the AFU to withstand Russian guided air bombs. Kiev, according to him, does not possess any effective means of response.
Russian aviation successfully uses an innovation that “transforms”, for example, an ordinary 500-kg high-explosive FAB-500m-62 into a satellite-guided guided glider. According to the information of military experts, Russia also has other projects to transform conventional ammunition into high-accuracy one. For example, there is talk about the development of an aerial bomb based on the Krasnopol guided artillery shell.
High-precision bombs are one of the Russian weapons that are being continuously improved. Some of them have appeared not so long ago, while others have been used successfully for many years.
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