Russo-Ukraine war – Some Sparks of Brilliance Re-visited

Lt Gen (Dr) V K Saxena (Retd), PVSM, AVSM, VSM

While even the mention of Ukraine’s victory at this time and stage of the Russo-Ukraine war may be unthinkable, but in the course of nearly four years now, the credit for several acts of tactical and strategic brilliance in the battlefield cannot be snatched from them. This work recounts some such acts briefly, for their abiding value to a warfighter.

Saving Air and Air Defence Power to Fight Another Day

It was in 2014 during the first Donbas war when the Ukrainian air and air defences got their first battering at the hands of the mighty Russian air power.

According to reports, Ukraine lost some 22 combat aircraft and attack helicopters . These included – 2 Mig 29s, 1 Su24, 6 Su 25s, 5 Mi24s, 8 Mi8/17. The losses also included one each of An 26 and IL 76 military transport aircraft, taking the total to 24.^[1]

How big is 24? Quite big considering the fact that out of some 144 aircrafts held in the Ukrainian inventory in 2014, only about two thirds ( 90-95) were operational. Some reports also indicate that they had only 57 fighters and 24 active SU24s.^[2]

While there is no authentic record of the specifics of the Ukrainian air defence losses in 2014, the reported wide-scale destruction of assets on ground including seizing of several towns by invading Russian forces said nothing big on Ukrainian air defences. Also, Russia deliberately obscured air data on the stance that it never applied its air power! Another fact which the Ukrainians realised was that most of their aircraft losses were by Russian man-potable missiles (MANPADS).^[3]

Cutting to Feb 2022

Lets start with the results:-

The Russian pre-emptive strike launched on the night 23/24 Feb did not fully achieve its intended aim. Period.

The pre-emptive featured a heavy punch of strike aircrafts (Su 25,24; 25 SM 27, 35 and 30s), fighter bombers (Sus 34s and 24s) long range strategic bombers (TU 22Ms, 95 and 160s) along with a host of attack helicopters (Mi 8, 24, 35 and the twin rotor Kamovs 51 and 52s). As stated, this strike it did not fully achieve the following:-^[4]

• Killing maximum number of Ukrainian air assets (aircrafts, runways, control infrastructure) on ground by conducting effective counter air operations (CAO).
• Suppression of Ukrainian air defences (SEAD) by taking out their sensors and destroying their air defence control nodes constituting what is called the ‘Air Defence Control and Reporting System’ or ADCRS. In air defence parlance, the ADCRS is the command and control system that executes the fast-flowing and dynamic air defence battle in near real time.

While there may be any number of reasons for the sub-optimal performance of the pre-emptive strike on the Russian side (possible loss of surprise, lack of targeting information, training/experience deficit of combat pilots, communication blues and more) there are solid points in favour of Ukrainians:-

• Way back in 2014 when their air and air defences took a heavy beating Ukrainians realized that if that if they were to survive to fight another day, the air and ground combat assets must survive the Russian onslaught.
• This realization presumably drove them to put their ADCRS nodes underground, as well as, maximum of their air assets under concrete.
• While there is no specific input in the open source to validate the above presumption, the sub-optimal results of the Russian pre-emptive in Feb 2022 definitely point to this.
• Not only the Ukrainian air defences survived the massive Russian punitive strikes, their meager air power kept the Ukrainian skies contested right till the end when remnants of their defensive capability got totally overwhelmed by the Russian drone and missile attacks.
• What was the result ? The all-powerful Russian air power could not achieve even a comprehensive Favourable Air Situation in the early days of war leave aside Air Superiority which implies total dominance of the skies.
• In sharp contrast to the above, stand the Israeli air strikes in Iran in June 2025. The type of air superiority which the Israeli air force achieved all in a matter of four days remained elusive all through four years to the second largest air force of the world. That is the power of the defender who keeps his air defences alive!

^[5]

Paying Them Back in the Same Coin

Soon after the pre-emptive during the early days when the Russian war machine was rolling out its fury in a blitzkrieg with hundreds and thousands of tanks, BMPs, Infantry Combat vehicles, self-propelled artillery and more, surging forward towards the gut of Eastern Ukraine Russian attack helicopters played havoc.

The Kamovs and the Mi series were armed to the teeth with deadly antitank missiles, laser-guided rockets and fire-n-forget PGMs. These had the capability to fly ultra-low, almost in the nap-of-the-earth thus avoiding radar detection. These machines caused disproportionate casualties in the bold hunter-killer missions taken with impunity deep inside the gut of Eastern Ukraine.

An old lesson came home. Presumably the Ukrainians realised how in 2014 their air fleet was depleted severely in the face of Russian MANPADS? The reaction was immediate. Ukrainians proliferated each nook and corner of the Tactical Battle Area (TBA) with a high density of MANPADs.

They had many thousands of them ( indigenous – Strela 2m, Igla, Igla 1M, Igla 1S, ), FIM -92 Stingers from US, Starstreak MANPADS from UK, Mistrals from France, Piorun MANPADS from Poland, FN 6 from China as also similar weapons from Lithuania, Netherlands and Denmark. ^[6],^[7] What was the result?

• Besides the missile warning sensors, as well as, active and passive counter measure pods available on board most of the attack helicopters, the Russian machines were simply ‘drowned’ (read overwhelmed) in numbers of MANPADS that waited for them in the hiding!
• MANPADS caused disproportionate kills. As per one open source, as much as 26 AHs and 39 combat aircrafts fleet were downed in a short period from 24 Feb to 27 June 2022.^[9] For attack helicopters 26 is a huge number taking into account the assessed total fleet strength of some 100. It is not the machine alone, it is the trained combat pilot whose loss would be irreplaceable any time soon.

So what the Ukrainians faced in 2014 they actually tried to give it back in 2022.

Nothing Short of a Revolution

Ukrainians had known how in Jan 2018 a swarm of mere 13 DIY drones had caused havoc on the Russian air base at Khmeimim and Naval base at Tartus, both in Western Syria. The might of deadly Russian air defence weapons like the Pantsir 1S or the Igla series of MANPADS deployed at these bases could not defeat the drones totally. A realization stared in the face – conventional Russian air defence weaponry lacked tailor-made anti-drone capability?^[10]

This realization got a real time validation in Feb 2022 when the Russian long-winding thrust lines were seen to ‘carrying’ air defence fire units packed and moving as ‘convoy serials’ rather than leap-frogging deployment-to-deployment, supporting the mechanized columns.

Somewhere around this stage, Ukrainians also realized that their drones were largely going unchallenged unable to be detected by the Russian conventional air defence sensors on the move and were thus able to cause disproportionate casualties.

In those initial days, Ukraine mainly had the Turkish Bayractar TB2 reconnaissance (recce) and strike drones and the US switchblade kamikaze drones besides indigenous recce and surveillance machines, small drones and quad-copters.

Seeing the initial successes of the drones simply ramming into huge sensors of air defence equipment or striking the mechanised vehicles and turning them into balls of fire, awakened the Ukrainians into a new realization- ‘drones are their thing’ against a huge war machine deficient of specific anti-drone arsenal.

This realization was to be the turning point in drone perspective of the Ukrainians.

As early as July 2022, the Ukraine World Congress (UWC) and the Ukrainian Ministry of Digital Transformation joined hands by signing a Memorandum of Co-operation (MoC). This MoC envisaged support for the Army of Drones Project under the UNITED 24 fundraising Project.

This project envisaged large scale drone procurement, delivery, maintenance and employment of hundreds and thousands of drones to defend the then 2470 km (relevant in Jul 22; now frontlines have changed) of battle front. Alongside this, the drone pilot training was also taken up on war-footing^[11]

In June 2024, Ukraine became the only country in the world to create a separate branch of its armed forces dedicated to drones alone. This branch was named Unmanned Systems Forces.^[12] Earlier in Dec 2023 President Zelenskyy announced that Ukraine will make a million drones a year on its own steam, This could go up to 2 million with external support.^[13]

Today Ukraine has in its inventory an impressive range and depth of drones. Some of these include the strike and strike-cum-recce drones (e.g. Turkish Bayractar TB2, US made Phoenix Ghost) autonomous loitering munitions, (Ukrainian Punisher multi-purpose strike and recce drone and more), multi-copters with varying payloads (R 18 octocopter – payload 5 kg, Baba Yaga series of heavy multi-copters with up to 15 kg of rocket munitions) loitering drones in the kamikaze mode like the high speed UJ 25 or the Skyline drone that defies interception.^[14]

In addition there are drones like DJI and Autel which are capable of undertaking tactical operations like short term recce with an endurance of say 5 hours or smaller machines like the Stark -100 and Fury with endurance capability up to 3 hours. There are bigger machines like the PD2 or Raybird 3 which have the endurance for up to 10 hours.

After the initial debacle as the Russians started to gear up their arsenal with quick inductions of tailor-made anti-drone weaponry, as also consolidating their electronic warfare ( EW) punch (Russia has very strong EW capability comprising of anti-drone jammers, airborne fire control radar jammers, radar jammers, long range HF/VHF/UHF communication jammers GPS and SATCOM jammers etc).^[15] These started to play havoc on the GPS/satellite guided Ukrainian machines.

It was around this time (end 22/early 23) that Ukrainians increasingly started to depend on First Person View (FPV) drones. Independent of GPS the operators guided these machines to targets looking at the camera feeds from the drone itself. FPV strikes were highly successful in the air defence and interception roles or for taking precise strikes where the operator could pass the feed on the thread.

There has been no looking back – ‘drones and Ukraine have kept company’. Even at this stage when all seems to be over, the news of Ukrainian drone strikes continues to arrive with an abiding continuity.

As recent as 11 Dec 2025, a post from the Ukrainian media claimed that its most massive drone strike involving some 300 drones of all types along with an array of missiles set ablaze five Russian oil refineries, struck four airfields and an offshore oil rig in the Caspian Sea.^[16]

While that could be counted slightly over, with number hiked to befit a rebuttal to President Trump’s assertion that Ukraine ‘had no cards’, the strike was indeed massive as live-streaming videos show it. Besides this, the picture of Russian targets struck/set on fire by Ukrainian drones is a near regular news feed.