AIR, LAND & SEA; UKRAINE TURNS THE TIDE OF WAR

It’s hard to think this war is now approaching four and a half years. It’s been a brutal fight. Ukraine looked like it should be defeated in days, but turned the situation around in a matter of 7 months, sending the Russians running in Kherson and in the North East – lines they have completely failed to regain in four years of war.

The Russians have made many advances, they took towns and villages through brutal means, sacrificed well over 1.25 million men but they still control less than they did in 2022.

We watched as the NATO advised and overly publicized offensive into Zaporhiziha ground to failure – but at the same time provided extraordinary lessons about tactics, armor, drones and the importance of aviation or the lack of it.

We watched the dark days of near desperation that drove the concept for the Ukrainian Kursk offensive – its success and eventual inevitable failure as the Russians acted as Russians usually do. It was a gambit for time in the end and ended in near catastrophe as the Russians introduced the now ubiquitous fiber optic drone, right at a time when Ukrainian soldiers felt the Americans had finally betrayed them.

In late 2023 through early 2025 the Ukrainians began to order new drone systems and accelerate their development, well past the tactical range. A concerted effort through 2025 to change strategy and learn the lessons of the war began a fast paced on-the-fly transformation that self magnified. Every new drone development opened up a new set of options that drove even more drone development, not just technologically, but tactically and strategically.

Ukraine had finally worked out how to stop the Russians using their manpower advantage, while understanding they could not afford to lose the men and equipment on the scale they had been, even though that was still well below what Russia was losing.

They also understood that the best way to defend on the front line was to prevent the Russians producing the equipment they needed at a granular level. It wasn’t just about oil refineries and export terminals – that was large scale economic warfare where Russia was exceptionally vulnerable. That was about income and funding the war. What Ukraine needed to do was stop the Russians building the drones, the cruise missiles and the ballistic missiles, the glide bombs, it was using on the front lines and to attack civilians.

There are certain prerequisites to make these targets available to be attacked. First you need the weapons with the right range and warheads. They then have to survive crossing the front line and reaching the deeper industrial parts of Russia, where factories are spread out across multiple towns and cities vast distances apart. Russia has always had the advantage of massive distances, which traditionally have made it impossibly hard to reach vital targets. Ukraine turned that against them.

The first obstacle is to get through the air defences, spread thin by the very distances that had previously saved Russia. Ukrainian drone operations have been remarkable at tracking them down and eliminating them. S-400 batteries are almost unheard of, the S-300 the same, Pantsir point defence systems seem remarkably unsuited to their task. I don’t know how many videos I’ve seen lately where a Pantsir missile flies right past the drone it’s tracking. Either they’re utter garbage or Ukraine is running a brilliant countermeasures system on their drones.

One of the best examples of the cat and mouse game Ukraine has run against the air defence systems is on Crimea. Its importance to Russia is so great they don’t stop pushing air defences into the region at the expense of mainland Russia. The reason? Because if Ukraine is going after the naval bases, the oil export terminals on the Black Sea and their refineries. That means attack drones have to fly over Crimea. Their success in defeating every single object the Russians have put in their way is testament to their skill and ingenuity. The Russians still put radars they can barely afford to replace, missile systems they have few left of, and even mainline aircraft at air bases, in places they know the Ukrainians are likely to find them. Ukraine wipes them out, Russia puts them back. Only in the last few months, as everywhere else on the extended lines, fewer and fewer are available and it’s starting to notice.

The campaign against air defences has been utterly relentless. Because it’s been so successful Ukrainian drones have pierced deep inside Russia. One strand has gone for the oil refineries and the supporting pumping stations and storage sites. The other has targeted optical equipment factories, microprocessor foundries, electrical component manufacturers, warhead casing factories, explosive factories, chemical plants that make the precursor chemicals for explosives and rocket motors and a host of other components that make Russian weapons possible.

The strikes have been so efficient they’ve hit record keeping and administration blocks, computer centers, not just the production plants. They’ve been so effective we have actually witnessed a huge reduction in cruise missile use, numbers of Iskander missiles have noticeably reduced and not increased – despite China actually helping to increase their physical production, because the components to make them have become unavailable. Ukraine has even seen a decrease in the efficacy of Shaeed strikes because they no longer have the radio technical equipment to coordinate their patterns as they were.

The erosion of industrial capacity is inevitably incremental. Hitting the choke points is the art of the game, because the wider industrial base is too large to target – thats something the Russians have increasingly found in their attacks on Ukraine, and to counter it Ukraine reduced the number of choke points by spreading them out so that no one point became crippling to a key program. Russia has however begun a long term program of moving some of their key factories to the far east. I doubt ultimately, by the time they have established the factory and restarted production, Ukraine will have a means of reaching even them. They’ve already proven they can make long range strikes by being inventive. Besides the economics are hardly working in Russia’s favor.

One of the few systems Ukraine has not sufficiently been able to impact is the glide bomb. The Russians are using well over 1,000 a month and they’re devastating. It’s these rather than heavy artillery that destroy the front line towns and villages. Their tactical impact can be profound.

The reason it’s been hard to stop them is the simplicity of the system, The bombs themselves are not new, but drawn out of vast arsenals of left over Soviet weaponry. The bombs triggers and timers are replaced or refurbished – thats a choke point if you can find it – and the rest of the kits is a cheap to produce wing and targeting system that the bomb is bolted into. The easiest means of stopping these bombs is cutting off their launchers – the Su-34 twin seat fighter bomber.

It’s noticeable that in the past weeks Ukraine has restarted attacking rear airfields and Su-34 sites – and the Su-34 is always a priority target if found airborne. Russia just doesn’t have the means to make up their numbers, delivering maybe five a year. Even so carrying between 1 and 4 per sortie with ranges of 100km they continue to be a high level concern. Yet it’s not one Ukraine has by any means given up on, and thats their spirit. There is a solution, there are options, it’s just a question of how and when they make it work.

Offensively the Russian people now see for themselves and are aware of the scale of the war. They see things happening in their towns that have never happened before in living memory. Vast palls of smoke spreading hundreds of kilometers, oil raining down. Chemical factories ablaze, an optical equipment factory completely obliterated. The see the ‘debris’ of drones and the fires the supposed debris has caused. They know the truth. The complain and they moan, and their voices get louder. The mil- and z-bloggers are particularly loud. But no Russian, no blogger even asks for a second what have we done to deserve this? What have we done to Ukraine they would come for us in this way? What is the Czar doing to protect us? They want the war to end now, because they face potential defeat and economic collapse, it’s affecting ordinary lives. And they don’t like it. They’re more bothered about the fact that despite everything they’ve done, nobody respects or fears them – it’s the lack of fear they hate more than anything else. It’s a running theme underlying milblogger commentary.

Ukraine’s drone war hasn’t been simply tactically spectacular, its strategic victories materially impressive and destiny changing. It has actually reached into the psychology of Russia and has them questioning the and wherefore of the war, what it was all for and what are they going to do next. When senior military commentators whose opinions have been deeply effective in shaping the front line’s morale, and the way the regime has behaved, decided the war is lost, Russia has a real problem.

Ukraine has hit upon a winning strategy. Europe has helped them ensure it remains that until this war is won. I still believe it has to be won through a fight. Russia will not concede anything until it’s physically removed from a good tranche of Ukrainian soil. I think the Ukrainians know that deep down and they’re setting the conditions to make it eventually possible. Their hope is it doesn’t come to that and Russia will collapse economically first and its armies will simply walk away as the Germans did in WW1. Back then nobody thought it possible. Three weeks later the French and British were barely starting to run down operations after the armistice, the Germans literally walked home, in three weeks they were mostly gone.

History has a habit of repeating itself, even if its only through similarity. Russia is losing and they know it. Ukraine has them on the back foot, and if it maintains this pressure and increases it, it’s going to be unbearable. You can feel it now. When you’ve watched this war as intently as I and many others have you know things are different. Everyone does. Even Putin, I suspect the Americans do but they don’t dare admit it – but I’m sure senior military knows it. Keep up the pressure, never stop pushing, the final phase is approaching swiftly. I think this summer may be decisive.

The Analyst

MilitaryAnalyst.bsky.social

Russian house wife: railing against Putin and his war she said, “one day of the cost of bombing Ukraine could fix the teeth of every pensioner in Russia, but you choose bombs”.