Hello everybody! To conclude this series of features, let me start with the question with which I’ve ended the Part 3: how do you ‘outfight’ the S-400? For the start, and everybody’s orientation, the map providing an approximate reconstruction of the Russian integrated air defence system for southern Kherson, southern Zaporizhzhya and northern Crimea, as released already back in August:
(Must admit: for me, this is all so much 'nothing new', that after writing this feature I had a feeling like, 'oh dear, they're going to belittle me for "selling hot water'".... )
While the impact on the front lines is still minimal, in this war of attrition all of these strikes are helpful.Yet, I hoped for more action with the Neptunes. If Ukraine is to win this war of attrition where Western help is just sufficient to hold the line, strikes on the economic infrastructure in russia will be essential. And such strikes can be done only with made in UA weapons.
I would like to see some Russian refineries and pipelines dealt with by Ukrainian drones during this winter if the Russians start their terror campaigns again. It was terrible watching what they did last winter without getting anything in return. Would be nice if all their pipelines besides those going through Ukraine and Azerbaijan are put out of work.
Cannot but agree with your conclusion: just waiting for the West to help - is not going to help. There is no other solution but for Ukraine to find its own solutions.
Finally! Great Series and thank you. I'm wondering though how many such systems they have deployed in Ukraine, how many they possibly have available in total. Because if they have 60-80 S-300/400 batteries in total and 20 of them are deployed in Ukraine then its going to be bloody for them when Ukraine finally gets the ability to strike the radars on these expensive systems regularly. Replacing such losses over the course of this war would probably be their biggest challenge. Unless China can send them some of their knock off Radars. They're also rumoured to have had ~440 BUK launchers before the start of the war and have lost ~45 of those. With GLSDB surely Ukraine will be able to cause serious losses for the Russian medium to long range gbads stationed in Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and Donbas. For example during such moments where they deploy MALDs and drones to activate Russian GBADS.
China supplying its own radars and/or SAMs to Russia is not going to work.
These are so heavily modified (especially their processors and software), that they're 'not Russian' any more.
And it's not only the hardware and software for radars: even missiles are released in entirely different fashion (see 'cold launch', instead of the usual Russian 'hot launch').
....or, lets remain cautious: it might work, but would take at least 2-5 years to modify the software from Mandarin to Russian.... (it's like with Russian Su-30MKIs for India, where the Indians took about 5 years to re-write the complete software....)
It touches on corruption in Russian procurement apparatuses affecting deployment of a sector of radar infrastructure.
"11/ In yet another scandal linked to Lobuzko, investigators have also reportedly found that the giant Voronezh radars he once commanded have been severely degraded by the substitution of expensive military-grade components with cheap foreign equivalents."
According to Wikipedia "Voronezh radars (Russian: РЛС Воронеж) are the current generation of Russian early-warning radar, providing long distance monitoring of airspace against ballistic missile attack and aircraft monitoring"
SAMs are not invincibile: as you have already told, a near-stealth missile that fly very low may be detect only a few km from a not-state-of-art radar system, so (if you have good Intel) you can pre-program a path able to avoid detection...at least, from "1st" line of defense. Then...a radar may be under maintenance, another frontline system Is changing position...then, there are failures, especially in russian systems due to budget: think of when a fighter try to shoot at RAF spy plane: 2 missile does not ignite, another fail to trak it: in the world of dreams, that should be 2 hits. Then...Who knows. Maybe some partisans shots small fires to a Sam systems. Russian soldiers then easily repels this surprise attack, but for some minutes they achieved a mission kill. Or cyber warfare...Who knows...
Edit: personally, I think there are NET positives in Ukraine being feed small volumes, to hone their skills with and force discipline and creativity into their planning and use. This can only be a good thing as numbers available rise.
Honing skills is the effect, but what will Ukraine be rewarded with for all this optional extra destruction of its lives and property while the US gets a bargain destroying Russian military? NATO membership? EU membership? Rebuilding? I'd hope so!
If they go early and loose key people while others have not gained competence they'll be right back to having little capability and ground forces with no support again. Got to be done the right ways.
No no, I do not say they count only to luck. But the probability to actually successfully engage a missile (if correctly launched) could be low, if you sum good pianification, Intel, Path to avoid main battery sites, decoys, correct time (when more batteries are moving/out of the game for whatever reason...). Then, strategy, like explained in this article: you attack moskow so some batteries are moved to russian territory. You put in action everything to lower the probability of interception. Then...sometimes It goes all well, sometimes not.
Agree. Keep feeding Ukraine weapons and aircraft and they'll keep gutting Russian air defences.
It kind of blows my mind to see former USAF brass claiming in recent articles that Ukraine + F-16s won't survive against Russian air defences. I think that has to be disinformation, because I can't accept they're that ignorant, myopic, lacking in tactical creativity, or stymied by Russian IADS.
That looks like an opposition channel that publishes whatever bad they can find about the current Ukrainian government, a couple of posts every hour. Which does not mean that the published information is false.
1) The information. I don't think ZSU as the whole lost 90% of the last year's personnel - that would have led to a defeat, and would have been widely known. However, it is possible that some units, composed on regional basis, had very heavy losses, in Bakhmut last year or in Klischiivka this summer. Poltava could have been unlucky to form one of such nearly destroyed units in September last year.
2) The reason. Ukrainian politics is byzantine, a snake pit in modern language. That fashion saved the country from falling into a Russian-style tyranny, but now it is turning against Zelensky as he has concentrated too much power. And when there is a need for a dark PR, there will be corresponding news, and they will be widely spread.
Just a little off: Rumania finally declared a 30km wide "first shoot then ask" zone at the Ukrainian border, along the Danube. It means that the UAF has to cover only their own airspace, any drones which "mistakenly" flies south of the Danube can be handled by the Rumanian AD. (At least their Gepards will have some practice targets too...)
As I understand, Russians use some similar tactics with decoys and mix of different kinds of missiles and drones coming from different directions to overload Ukrainian air defence. And sometimes about 20-30% of missiles/drones come through, sometimes all of them got shut down. Of course, Russians still have much bigger (not necessarily better) air differences and numbers of missiles, but is it somehow possible to compare the efficiency of russian and ukrainian strikes and defence?
Yesno. Their tactics in this regards is slightly simpler: they rush a big number of missiles and LPGMs into the same piece of airspace - all at once. That is at least their tactics for attacks on Kyiv and Odesa.
Elsewhere, they're frequently routing cruise missiles and Shaheds very low along rivers, where these are extremely hard to find.
When people say low, what ranges are we talking about above ground?
I was also thinking about e.g. truss towers that you see on fairs & road shows. Maybe you don't even need a proper net, and just some stuff dangling from a steel cable would be enough.
One could perhaps add some extra netting or just lose strands that get launched into the air the moment something passes a trigger station a bit further along the river. That would mean you don't have to mess around with barrage balloons - which you may still want to do regardless.
Maybe somethin like this could also be made heli-deployable. That way if you have some advance warning and idea which routes are plausible you can add some more. But my feeling is that would just get them to fly a tad higher to make all this impractical.
Against the Shaheds I'd expect we'll eventually see raspberry or smartphone powered aimbots attached to the trigger mechanism, and the human's task is reduced to being a "mouse wiggler" and loader.
It would be very interesting to understand how F35 and B2 would perform in this environment.
Storm shadows can be used by F35s but out of the weapon bay, probably loosing their stealthiness. And I guess that Su-24s (copy of the F-111) can fly faster than F-35 at low altitude, because it was expressly designed for that.
AFAIK, F-35 can't pack a Storm Shadow into its bays: it's too big (and heavy).
Depending on available numbers, F-35s would 'go in' (well inside the range of the Russian SAMs) to lob dozens of JDAM-ERs at S-400s - as first. Then again, to finish off whatever was left intact. Then they would repeat the exercise with Buks, Tors etc., until none are left.
I have read (not 100% sure about the source) that theoretically F35 could carry Storm shadow externally. Seems royal air force discontinued this project. That could be the reason because UK has sent those weapon to Ukraine: they could be useless soon.
Extermally - yes. But, and even more so, it's going to carry the JASSM.
That said, adding such weapons to the F-35 has 'no priority', right now, because, as explained above, it can go 'in' and log multiple smaller GBU-62s.
Mind that F-35 is made for ops at high altitudes and to supercruise: as such, it's an ideal platform to do exactly that kind of things - so also well inside the range of the Russian SAMs.
F-35A was specifically designed to find and kill the most lethal SAMS Russia has. As well as ballistic and cruise missiles.
The weapon bay opening is irrelevant. F-35A was tested to release weapons in all areas of its transonic flight-envelope. Which includes inverted, in a 9G, +60 degree angle of attack maneuver. Which is all part of its flight envelope.
i.e. a Russian radar won't obtain a viable line-of-sight to the weapon bay, if the pilot chooses to deny it one. The bay's opening and closing is fully-automated. It's programmed to occur as rapidly as possible, the doors snap open, the system uses compressed-air to force weapon ejection, the bay snaps closed.
Radars need time to scan enough to build up the data layer necessary to find and lock on a target. The F-35 weapon bay was designed to deny such enemy sensors the exposure time and angles necessary to do so.
Thus S400 radars will not see the weapon bay, nor a weapon launch, if the pilot decides to hide that launch of a standoff glide-bomb, from outside the weapon lock/track range of an S400, but still well inside the weapon strike radius of a JDAM-ER. The S400 will then be pre-occupied with what it can see. And F-35A EA/EW will do a lot to prevent an S400 from clearly seeing and responding to JDAM-ER, or SDBII.
F-35A was designed, from the beginning, to give pilots multiple means of defeating weapon-quality-lock data. That's why it has two huge rudders, and instantaneous sustained, and stable up to 60-deg angle-of-attack.
In other words, an F-35A could present the closest and most capable radars nearest to it, with the most optimised RCS and IR profile, whilst still flying in a direction that's totally different, to the direction that F-35A's nose is pointing. It also has the engine performance and fuel quantity necessary to do that (same for F-22A btw). It can also manage engine IR signatures and hot-section exposures in the same sort of way to defeat IR, when moving away from IR sensor or missile. It can fly away with the engine nozzle and hot-section largely hidden behind the tail surfaces. The engine also has a bleed-air IR-diffuser, that shields the hot-section. Plus it has a towed-decoy plus a very powerful broadband jamming capability, that's built directly into the aircraft's structure. Plus the usual chaff and flare options. That seem likely to soon include an anti-missile-missile, and a HEL-DIRCM system.
Plus an autopilot that's fully integrated with its sensor data so that autopilot can be programmed to see, bleed-energy and kinematically defeat all incoming AAMs or SAMS (even if they could get a sustained weapon-lock).
There's also a very high likelihood the autopilot will be managed by an Ai in future, specifically to comprehensively optimise efficiency and tactical plus signature advantages along the aircraft's planned mission flight path, to deliver weapons, and to defeat weapons, then RTB, or go to an alternate landing site, with enough fuel to remain above minimum fuel requirements.
So Russians would not be shooting down F-35A, in 2023, or 2033.
If the Russians don't have a viable means to beat this ability to break weapon lock-data, for any weapon its targeted with, or fired at it, the Russians will simply lose every SAM and fighter they have that they've not very carefully hidden in ways that render the IADS non-operative.
Remember how Iraqis buried their MiG25s under sand, to survive the 3rd and 4th-gen strike fighters?
That's what Russia would have to do with the S400, to survive an F-35A's attack.
The same applies to every IADS operating today.
US and Allied 5th-gen airpower is in an astoundingly dominant position, at present. They're far more dominant than they were during Operation Desert-Storm, at the end of the cold-war.
In 2023, they're about as dominant as they were at the end of WWII. It would be a colossal error for any country to try to take-on Western airpower, at present, or for the next few decades.
Hello, Tom. AFAIK, Germany send to Ukraine some mine-clearing vihicle. My guess, it is Keiler mine flail . If it is true, could you please, share some details about its performance?
Danke Tom!
wie immer, klar und interessant für einen laien.
🫡💛💙
🤞✌️
Thx, glad to hear it's of some use.
(Must admit: for me, this is all so much 'nothing new', that after writing this feature I had a feeling like, 'oh dear, they're going to belittle me for "selling hot water'".... )
While the impact on the front lines is still minimal, in this war of attrition all of these strikes are helpful.Yet, I hoped for more action with the Neptunes. If Ukraine is to win this war of attrition where Western help is just sufficient to hold the line, strikes on the economic infrastructure in russia will be essential. And such strikes can be done only with made in UA weapons.
I would like to see some Russian refineries and pipelines dealt with by Ukrainian drones during this winter if the Russians start their terror campaigns again. It was terrible watching what they did last winter without getting anything in return. Would be nice if all their pipelines besides those going through Ukraine and Azerbaijan are put out of work.
Cannot but agree with your conclusion: just waiting for the West to help - is not going to help. There is no other solution but for Ukraine to find its own solutions.
It's not either/or though, they'll do all of the above.
Yes, even though the West benefits from what Ukraine is doing.
Both sides try to outwit the enemy. But we hope that Western military facilities will triumph. Many thanks for your story.
These are Ukrainians brains that outwit the ruzzians, and use Western tools for impact..
As always, highly enlightening. Many thanks Tom.
Finally! Great Series and thank you. I'm wondering though how many such systems they have deployed in Ukraine, how many they possibly have available in total. Because if they have 60-80 S-300/400 batteries in total and 20 of them are deployed in Ukraine then its going to be bloody for them when Ukraine finally gets the ability to strike the radars on these expensive systems regularly. Replacing such losses over the course of this war would probably be their biggest challenge. Unless China can send them some of their knock off Radars. They're also rumoured to have had ~440 BUK launchers before the start of the war and have lost ~45 of those. With GLSDB surely Ukraine will be able to cause serious losses for the Russian medium to long range gbads stationed in Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and Donbas. For example during such moments where they deploy MALDs and drones to activate Russian GBADS.
China supplying its own radars and/or SAMs to Russia is not going to work.
These are so heavily modified (especially their processors and software), that they're 'not Russian' any more.
And it's not only the hardware and software for radars: even missiles are released in entirely different fashion (see 'cold launch', instead of the usual Russian 'hot launch').
....or, lets remain cautious: it might work, but would take at least 2-5 years to modify the software from Mandarin to Russian.... (it's like with Russian Su-30MKIs for India, where the Indians took about 5 years to re-write the complete software....)
I came across this article from https://mstdn.social/@ChrisO_wiki@mastodon.social.
It touches on corruption in Russian procurement apparatuses affecting deployment of a sector of radar infrastructure.
"11/ In yet another scandal linked to Lobuzko, investigators have also reportedly found that the giant Voronezh radars he once commanded have been severely degraded by the substitution of expensive military-grade components with cheap foreign equivalents."
According to Wikipedia "Voronezh radars (Russian: РЛС Воронеж) are the current generation of Russian early-warning radar, providing long distance monitoring of airspace against ballistic missile attack and aircraft monitoring"
I underline "cheap foreign equivalents"
Thats great to know. So now we just need to pray they continue taking these systems out.
SAMs are not invincibile: as you have already told, a near-stealth missile that fly very low may be detect only a few km from a not-state-of-art radar system, so (if you have good Intel) you can pre-program a path able to avoid detection...at least, from "1st" line of defense. Then...a radar may be under maintenance, another frontline system Is changing position...then, there are failures, especially in russian systems due to budget: think of when a fighter try to shoot at RAF spy plane: 2 missile does not ignite, another fail to trak it: in the world of dreams, that should be 2 hits. Then...Who knows. Maybe some partisans shots small fires to a Sam systems. Russian soldiers then easily repels this surprise attack, but for some minutes they achieved a mission kill. Or cyber warfare...Who knows...
Ukrainian stocks of long-range missiles are very limited. It is impossible to rely on luck.
Only because they were previously non-existent.
Edit: personally, I think there are NET positives in Ukraine being feed small volumes, to hone their skills with and force discipline and creativity into their planning and use. This can only be a good thing as numbers available rise.
Honing skills is the effect, but what will Ukraine be rewarded with for all this optional extra destruction of its lives and property while the US gets a bargain destroying Russian military? NATO membership? EU membership? Rebuilding? I'd hope so!
If they go early and loose key people while others have not gained competence they'll be right back to having little capability and ground forces with no support again. Got to be done the right ways.
No no, I do not say they count only to luck. But the probability to actually successfully engage a missile (if correctly launched) could be low, if you sum good pianification, Intel, Path to avoid main battery sites, decoys, correct time (when more batteries are moving/out of the game for whatever reason...). Then, strategy, like explained in this article: you attack moskow so some batteries are moved to russian territory. You put in action everything to lower the probability of interception. Then...sometimes It goes all well, sometimes not.
I always thought that Harm missiles are very effective but I don't see them often mentioned in this war.
Agree. Keep feeding Ukraine weapons and aircraft and they'll keep gutting Russian air defences.
It kind of blows my mind to see former USAF brass claiming in recent articles that Ukraine + F-16s won't survive against Russian air defences. I think that has to be disinformation, because I can't accept they're that ignorant, myopic, lacking in tactical creativity, or stymied by Russian IADS.
There is a report that the US delivered large 3D printers to Ukraine to enable for quick repair of arms https://defensescoop.com/2023/09/15/pentagon-arms-ukraine-with-industrial-size-3d-printers/
Interesting piece of information here - https://t.me/mosiychuk72/29022
90% of mobilized last september are out of action.
current mobilization plan is fulfilled for 13%.
I wonder why they officially publish this information. What is the plan?
P.S. the information comes from the Head of the Poltava Regional TsK
That looks like an opposition channel that publishes whatever bad they can find about the current Ukrainian government, a couple of posts every hour. Which does not mean that the published information is false.
the news is everywhere - https://shorturl.at/juL06
the channel does not matter. What matters is the information and reason to make it public.
1) The information. I don't think ZSU as the whole lost 90% of the last year's personnel - that would have led to a defeat, and would have been widely known. However, it is possible that some units, composed on regional basis, had very heavy losses, in Bakhmut last year or in Klischiivka this summer. Poltava could have been unlucky to form one of such nearly destroyed units in September last year.
2) The reason. Ukrainian politics is byzantine, a snake pit in modern language. That fashion saved the country from falling into a Russian-style tyranny, but now it is turning against Zelensky as he has concentrated too much power. And when there is a need for a dark PR, there will be corresponding news, and they will be widely spread.
That sounds - wildly - exaggerated.
I know figures for several of 'busiest' brigades, and these are indicating nothing even distantly similar.
....with 90% of attrition rate, be sure: ZSU would've been out of this war already months ago.
I've heard of 98% death rate for the Klischiivka assault this summer. Don't know the information source personally, though.
On the Russian side - yes. That's why the 72nd MRB was eventually destroyed.
On the Ukrainian: just no way.
The runner of that channel is someone caught on video demanding bribes while being a member of parliament.
He managed to avoid jail because of his status a member of parliament, and a technicality.
Not a trustworthy source.
Reread the thread and think again.
Oh... regional voienkom as a source... there is a reason they are all dismissed.
Funny, reading all this and then realizing I already knew a lot of it due to.. an after action writeup of a game, of all things.
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/ad-astra-an-aurora-forum-game-run-by-blue-emu.534008/
Thank you for the insights!
Just a little off: Rumania finally declared a 30km wide "first shoot then ask" zone at the Ukrainian border, along the Danube. It means that the UAF has to cover only their own airspace, any drones which "mistakenly" flies south of the Danube can be handled by the Rumanian AD. (At least their Gepards will have some practice targets too...)
https://romania.europalibera.org/a/32594582.html
Oh good. Was about the time.
I hope they will follow through...
As I understand, Russians use some similar tactics with decoys and mix of different kinds of missiles and drones coming from different directions to overload Ukrainian air defence. And sometimes about 20-30% of missiles/drones come through, sometimes all of them got shut down. Of course, Russians still have much bigger (not necessarily better) air differences and numbers of missiles, but is it somehow possible to compare the efficiency of russian and ukrainian strikes and defence?
Yesno. Their tactics in this regards is slightly simpler: they rush a big number of missiles and LPGMs into the same piece of airspace - all at once. That is at least their tactics for attacks on Kyiv and Odesa.
Elsewhere, they're frequently routing cruise missiles and Shaheds very low along rivers, where these are extremely hard to find.
Is it possible to catch them with nets or wires?
Shaheds are 2.5 m wide - slightly larger than birds
Never seen a large eagle here. Storks are common, though. But they should not fly fast enough to get injured by ropes.
When people say low, what ranges are we talking about above ground?
I was also thinking about e.g. truss towers that you see on fairs & road shows. Maybe you don't even need a proper net, and just some stuff dangling from a steel cable would be enough.
One could perhaps add some extra netting or just lose strands that get launched into the air the moment something passes a trigger station a bit further along the river. That would mean you don't have to mess around with barrage balloons - which you may still want to do regardless.
Maybe somethin like this could also be made heli-deployable. That way if you have some advance warning and idea which routes are plausible you can add some more. But my feeling is that would just get them to fly a tad higher to make all this impractical.
Against the Shaheds I'd expect we'll eventually see raspberry or smartphone powered aimbots attached to the trigger mechanism, and the human's task is reduced to being a "mouse wiggler" and loader.
It would be very interesting to understand how F35 and B2 would perform in this environment.
Storm shadows can be used by F35s but out of the weapon bay, probably loosing their stealthiness. And I guess that Su-24s (copy of the F-111) can fly faster than F-35 at low altitude, because it was expressly designed for that.
AFAIK, F-35 can't pack a Storm Shadow into its bays: it's too big (and heavy).
Depending on available numbers, F-35s would 'go in' (well inside the range of the Russian SAMs) to lob dozens of JDAM-ERs at S-400s - as first. Then again, to finish off whatever was left intact. Then they would repeat the exercise with Buks, Tors etc., until none are left.
I have read (not 100% sure about the source) that theoretically F35 could carry Storm shadow externally. Seems royal air force discontinued this project. That could be the reason because UK has sent those weapon to Ukraine: they could be useless soon.
Extermally - yes. But, and even more so, it's going to carry the JASSM.
That said, adding such weapons to the F-35 has 'no priority', right now, because, as explained above, it can go 'in' and log multiple smaller GBU-62s.
Mind that F-35 is made for ops at high altitudes and to supercruise: as such, it's an ideal platform to do exactly that kind of things - so also well inside the range of the Russian SAMs.
F-35A was specifically designed to find and kill the most lethal SAMS Russia has. As well as ballistic and cruise missiles.
The weapon bay opening is irrelevant. F-35A was tested to release weapons in all areas of its transonic flight-envelope. Which includes inverted, in a 9G, +60 degree angle of attack maneuver. Which is all part of its flight envelope.
i.e. a Russian radar won't obtain a viable line-of-sight to the weapon bay, if the pilot chooses to deny it one. The bay's opening and closing is fully-automated. It's programmed to occur as rapidly as possible, the doors snap open, the system uses compressed-air to force weapon ejection, the bay snaps closed.
Radars need time to scan enough to build up the data layer necessary to find and lock on a target. The F-35 weapon bay was designed to deny such enemy sensors the exposure time and angles necessary to do so.
Thus S400 radars will not see the weapon bay, nor a weapon launch, if the pilot decides to hide that launch of a standoff glide-bomb, from outside the weapon lock/track range of an S400, but still well inside the weapon strike radius of a JDAM-ER. The S400 will then be pre-occupied with what it can see. And F-35A EA/EW will do a lot to prevent an S400 from clearly seeing and responding to JDAM-ER, or SDBII.
F-35A was designed, from the beginning, to give pilots multiple means of defeating weapon-quality-lock data. That's why it has two huge rudders, and instantaneous sustained, and stable up to 60-deg angle-of-attack.
In other words, an F-35A could present the closest and most capable radars nearest to it, with the most optimised RCS and IR profile, whilst still flying in a direction that's totally different, to the direction that F-35A's nose is pointing. It also has the engine performance and fuel quantity necessary to do that (same for F-22A btw). It can also manage engine IR signatures and hot-section exposures in the same sort of way to defeat IR, when moving away from IR sensor or missile. It can fly away with the engine nozzle and hot-section largely hidden behind the tail surfaces. The engine also has a bleed-air IR-diffuser, that shields the hot-section. Plus it has a towed-decoy plus a very powerful broadband jamming capability, that's built directly into the aircraft's structure. Plus the usual chaff and flare options. That seem likely to soon include an anti-missile-missile, and a HEL-DIRCM system.
Plus an autopilot that's fully integrated with its sensor data so that autopilot can be programmed to see, bleed-energy and kinematically defeat all incoming AAMs or SAMS (even if they could get a sustained weapon-lock).
There's also a very high likelihood the autopilot will be managed by an Ai in future, specifically to comprehensively optimise efficiency and tactical plus signature advantages along the aircraft's planned mission flight path, to deliver weapons, and to defeat weapons, then RTB, or go to an alternate landing site, with enough fuel to remain above minimum fuel requirements.
So Russians would not be shooting down F-35A, in 2023, or 2033.
If the Russians don't have a viable means to beat this ability to break weapon lock-data, for any weapon its targeted with, or fired at it, the Russians will simply lose every SAM and fighter they have that they've not very carefully hidden in ways that render the IADS non-operative.
Remember how Iraqis buried their MiG25s under sand, to survive the 3rd and 4th-gen strike fighters?
That's what Russia would have to do with the S400, to survive an F-35A's attack.
The same applies to every IADS operating today.
US and Allied 5th-gen airpower is in an astoundingly dominant position, at present. They're far more dominant than they were during Operation Desert-Storm, at the end of the cold-war.
In 2023, they're about as dominant as they were at the end of WWII. It would be a colossal error for any country to try to take-on Western airpower, at present, or for the next few decades.
S400 is just another target.
There is a report of 2x Buk M3 destroyed in Svitlodarsk (north-east of Donetsk) today https://racurs.ua/ua/n187332-vitannya-vid-syl-oborony-u-tokmaku-vrazyly-tehniku-okupantiv.html
Hello, Tom. AFAIK, Germany send to Ukraine some mine-clearing vihicle. My guess, it is Keiler mine flail . If it is true, could you please, share some details about its performance?
No Keilers, as the German Army has too few of those.
To the best of my knowledge those are Pearson mineploughs for mounting on Wisent and other Leopard 1 based vehicles.