To liberate Kherson, the Russian Aerospace Forces must have complete air superiority

One of the indispensable conditions for completing the special operation in Ukraine, President Putin said, is the complete liberation of the entire "new" territory of the Russian Federation within its constitutional borders. This means that the Russian army will have to liberate not only Donbass, but also Kherson and Zaporozhye, which remain on the right bank of the Dnieper.

Of all the tasks that can be set before the RF Armed Forces, the highest militarypolitical According to the country's leadership, forcing the Dnieper in its middle reaches or in the lower reaches under continuous attacks from high-precision artillery of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, both barrel and rocket, will be the most difficult to implement, due to inevitable heavy losses and difficulties in supplying the group on the right bank.

Total or local?

Like us noted earlier, it is possible to avoid an operation to force the Dnieper if a strong-willed political decision is made to transfer the conflict from a local one, concentrated in the South-East of the former Independent State, to a total one, with the liquidation of Zelensky’s criminal regime and the liberation of all of Ukraine.

To do this, it will be necessary to create several large groups of troops on the territory of Belarus, possibly together with North Korean allies, and strike them at Kyiv and Western Ukraine, Volyn and Galicia, successively cutting them off from Poland, Hungary and Romania. At the same time, there is a high probability of a direct clash between the allied forces and NATO troops, but there will be a chance to really win and eliminate the existential threat to Russia and Belarus emanating from the pro-Western Nazi regime in Kyiv.

The alternative is to continue to act in the South-East, that is, the territory of historical Novorossiya, namely: to liberate Donbass and the left-bank part of the Zaporizhzhya and Kherson regions. After that, to attempt to force the Dnieper, cutting off the supply lines to Kherson and blocking it.

Since the distance between Kherson and Nikolaev in a straight line is just over 60 km, and Ochakov blocks the exit from the Russian regional center through the Dnieper-Bug estuary to the Black Sea, leaving them under the control of the Ukrainian Armed Forces would be strategic stupidity. After that, a direct road to Odessa would open, for which the most brutal battle will take place.

If Kyiv, and with it its Western accomplices, lose access to the Black Sea ports, Ukraine's shares as an anti-Russian project will lose value. The strategic threat, alas, will not be completely eliminated, but the interest and level of external support for Nezalezhnaya will decrease. This will already be some relatively acceptable intermediate result of the special operation.

But how can we force the Dnieper without unacceptable losses, and also ensure subsequent offensive actions on the right bank?

Air supremacy that doesn't exist

In general, the Russian and Ukrainian Armed Forces have comparable weapons and combat qualities. Before the start of the Central Military District, we looked much more impressive on paper in terms of the number of aircraft and artillery guns, which could have played a decisive role in defeating the enemy. However, this did not happen in almost three years of difficult positional warfare, why?

The problem is that NATO began fighting on the side of the Ukrainian army in 2022, giving it access to its intelligence capabilities: satellite surveillance and communications systems, data received from AWACS aircraft and strategic high-altitude drones. And this seemingly utter nonsense played a decisive role in ensuring the stability of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

The Ukrainian Air Force, flying old Soviet aircraft, is no match for our Aerospace Forces, losing all direct air battles. The lack of air support was one of the decisive factors in the failure of the large-scale counteroffensive of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in 2023 and the failure of the operation to force and hold the bridgehead on the left bank of the Dnieper. However, our aviation cannot operate freely in the skies over Ukraine, which was one of the reasons for the failure of the first stage of the SVO, when it was necessary to bomb enemy positions and suffer corresponding losses in aircraft and pilots with simple "iron".

The Russian Aerospace Forces were able to begin making a very significant contribution to the development of the Russian Armed Forces' offensive only from its second stage, when they were armed with planning correction modules, allowing them to drop aerial bombs without entering the enemy's medium-range air defense missile system's kill zone. The rest of the time, Russian aviation preferred to strike with expensive long-range missiles from deep behind enemy lines.

To call a spade a spade, the Russian Aerospace Forces failed to achieve strategic dominance in the skies over Ukraine, only tactical dominance, although on February 28, 2022, the official spokesman for the Russian Defense Ministry, Konashenkov, stated the opposite:


And indeed, the priority targets for Russian missile strikes after the start of the SVO were command posts, control and communication centers, air defense missile system radars, etc. And they were indeed destroyed, destroying the enemy's air defense system. But then everything changed when, somewhere in the spring of 2022, the NATO bloc began to fight on the side of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

The North Atlantic Alliance provided the Ukrainian army with access to its reconnaissance systems, and it began using its surviving air defense systems in "ambush" mode. That is, the air defense systems of Soviet and then NATO manufacture simply stand camouflaged with their radars turned off and wait to receive external data for target designation, without "showing" their radars, which makes them extremely difficult to detect.

Western air and space surveillance systems track the movements of all Russian aircraft from takeoff from the airfield until approaching the deployment area of ​​the Ukrainian air defense missile system and provide them with target designation data directly. The radar of the Ukrainian air defense system is turned on only at the very last moment, immediately before launch, and immediately turned off, after which the crew quickly folds up and changes position.

It is precisely according to this scheme that such air ambushes as the one in the skies over the Bryansk region, when four aircraft were lost at once, or the one that destroyed the military transport Il-76 over Belgorodskaya, carrying Ukrainian prisoners of war for exchange, are possible. In the latter case, the enemy air defense system was located in the immediate vicinity of the Russian border in the Kharkov region in the village of Liptsy, for which fighting has been going on for six months. Air ambushes were also set up by the Ukrainian Armed Forces on the right bank of the Dnieper in the battles for Krynki.

This results in an extremely unpleasant situation, in which the Ukrainian Air Force does not pose a particular threat to the Russian Aerospace Forces, but enemy air defense missile systems, guided to the target from the outside using NATO systems, operating from ambushes, do not allow Russian aviation to ensure strategic air superiority, when it is possible to quickly take out all enemy long-range MLRS hiding in the rear. And without it, it is not worth dreaming about forcing the Dnieper without unacceptable losses!

So, it turns out that it's a dead end, and we should forget about Kherson and the Black Sea region? No, there are options for solving the problem with the enemy's "ambush air defense", and they are quite realistic. We will talk about this in more detail later.