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Polish Foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorksi said a victory against Vladimir Putin’s forces would be swift due to the “overwhelming superiority” of its air forces, even without support from the United States.
“If Russia attacked us and we took our gloves off, I think we would defeat Russia quite quickly. We have overwhelming superiority over Russia in air power. General, correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s something like 2,500 aircraft,” he said during a discussion at the Yalta European Strategy meeting in Kyiv on Saturday.
“Even without the US it’s still overwhelming, and I haven’t checked recently how many F-35s and JASSMs and all the deep-strike capabilities we have.”
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He went further to say that Poland could knock out half of Russia’s refining capacity in a matter of weeks. The comments were in relation to a potential conflict between Russia and Nato and not about the prospect of a direct war between Russia and Poland.
“But if the Ukrainians have knocked out half of Russia’s refining capacity in six months, we could do it in six weeks and take out the other half,” he continued.
Russian foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova accused Sikorski of “Russophobia of the brain” in discussing the conflict.
Speculation has abounded that Moscow is plotting to attack Nato, claims that the country has denied.
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Last month CIA director John Ratcliffe made a short trip to Moscow - the last time that a CIA chief visited the country personally was in the weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Several sources familiar with the discussions told CBS News that Ratcliffe had made the visit to warn Russia against an attack on Nato.
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Ukraine doesn’t have the numbers of advanced jets that NATO has. Drones have proven to be an astonishingly useful weapon, but it doesn’t mean they’re necessarily the best weapon for any given job, it means they’re the best weapon that Ukraine has access to at sufficient scale.
Western donations of jets to Ukraine are certainly not nothing, but Russia had a colossal aviation advantage going into this war. Ukraine’s air force does not have the ability to shut Russia’s down and fly where it pleases like the collective NATO air forces do
I don’t want to act like I am a military expert, but as far as I understand, the drone war has changed the battlefield drastically - they can be produced in masses, they are cheap and they fly low. This guy is talking about Russian energy infrastructure that has shown to be very vulnerable towards the Ukrainian drones. Your hypothesis is this could be carried out easier with bombers, I am not so sure about this. Getting your jet the whole way to Siberia to drop a bomb on an oil plant seems to be very risky to me.
Don’t get me wrong, I have no doubt NATO can easily reach air superiority over Russia, but transforming this air superiority into something useful, and that over a large country as Russia, is not as easy.
I’m no expert either, just trying to assume that the experts in charge of each country are operating rationally (which I assume you’re doing too). As far as I understand, the advantages a full-on human-piloted jet has over drones for something like striking Russian oil refinieres are:
Far bigger payloads. A drone can damage the refinery, but you need a shitload of drones or one big plane to destroy it
The ability to get past air defence. Ukraine has been rapidly switching up where it attacks to avoid Russia’s air defences. Hit one place for a while, Russia moves anti-air stuff to defend it, start attacking somewhere else. If you’re attacking with something much more capable, you can choose the targets that you think will hurt Russia the most rather than the ones Russia is defending the least
Russia has substantial drone production of its own and hasn’t stopped using its own air force. Similarly, Ukraine is still absolutely using what aviation it has
It’s also worth remembering that we hear a disproportionate amount about drone usage because a) it’s new and b) they inherently all have cameras on them streaming to a computer, so it’s incredibly easy to get footage of them working
If there’s no doubt that NATO can reach air superiority, then what’s the doubt about bombers reaching far into Siberia? Air superiority means that any aircraft can get anywhere uncontested.
In any case most NATO bombers are just heavier jets (oversimplified). ONLY the USA and China have purpose built strategic bombers.
To be fair, any air superiority scenario is always about some kind of specific geographic area, and Russia is big enough that there are likely to be targets beyond the range of the fighters that enforce air supremacy
Also there is a third country which operates strategic bombers: Russia. It has been using them against Ukraine, and Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb (the raid with trucks full of drones) was specifically an effort to take out a big chunk of that strategic bomber fleet
All correct. The sheer size works both in favor and against Russia. It’s harder to gain air superiority, but it’s also harder to cover everything with defense.
(I totally blocked out the Tupolev bombers in my mind, unintentionally.)