Tom Cooper believes that the air terror of Ukraine will restrain the Armed Forces and prolong the war.
and Iranian drones is the strategy of the new commander of the Russian army of occupation in Ukraine, Sergey Surovikin. It consists in causing great damage to Ukraine, tiring and intimidating the population, diverting the attention of our authorities and the army, in particular the Air Force, to the defense of the airspace and thus slowing down the advance of the Armed Forces at the front. And it will have a certain result. Austrian military expert Tom Cooper wrote about this in his column.
“The essence of Surovikin's strategy is clear, he “tested” it in Syria during 2015-2017: to make the normal management of the country impossible for the state leadership; to make the life of the civilian population as unbearable as possible – because this demoralizes the defenders at the fronts, and even kills the will to fight. And this last one is especially important, given that a) the Russians have not been able to stop the flow of Western weapons and ammunition to Ukraine for eight months, and b) it is extremely important for the Russians to gain time to replace the losses in their troops,” wrote Tom Cooper.
Read also: The enemy fired 36 missiles at Ukraine – Zelensky calls on the world to stop Russian terror
And the secondary goal of air terror against the Ukrainian power grid, according to the expert, is an attempt to “buy time.” The Russians hope to achieve this by slowing down the recovery of the Ukrainian economy and logistics. Also, by design, it should delay, postpone, or at least slow down the next Ukrainian counterattack until the recently mobilized reservists are “ready”.
Also, Cooper claims, the terror of kamikaze missiles and drones in conditions of a lack of air defense means forces the Ukrainian aviation – MiG-29 and Su-27 – to take to the sky to intercept them, instead of fulfilling the task of supporting the counteroffensive operations of the Armed Forces at the front.< /p>
“When Ukrainian interceptors are busy with interception flights, they cannot strike with AGM-88 HARM [an American high-speed anti-radar missile, with a range of more than 100 km and up to 300 km] on Russian air defense, as they did in September in the Kherson area (and it was quite successful: they reported 30 hits on the “Bukis”, “Pantsyri” and S-300). In addition, when Ukrainian interceptors are busy searching for and shooting down approaching cruise missiles, they are exposed to Russian interceptors and long-range surface-to-air missiles,” the expert wrote.
Read also: After the missile strikes of the Russian Federation the work of the “Rivneazot” workshops stopped due to an emergency.
It is precisely because of such flights, as Cooper writes, that recently in the Poltava region, the Armed Forces of Ukraine lost, according to different information, one or two of their planes.
“In general, there can be no doubt that the result of the “Surovikin missile offensive” will have a direct impact on the development of events on the battlefield. The longer this continues, the longer Russia will be able to support these actions, the more damage Ukraine will suffer. The more damage Ukraine suffers, the more time it will take the Armed Forces to launch a counteroffensive… and the longer the war will last, in which there will be even more suffering among the civilian population,” concluded Tom Cooper.
Read also: Missile terror is Surovikin's only strategy: an expert assessed the threat to Ukraine in the coming days
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We will remind you that the other day The Guardian, citing analysts of the Ukrainian OSINT community Molfar, wrote that to shoot down Iranian drones, Ukraine has to spend more than they themselves cost. However, military expert, retired lieutenant general and former deputy chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Ihor Romanenko called such a statement a “dilettantial assessment”, stating that the cost of spent air defense assets should not be compared with the cost of drones, but with the possible damage they can cause when they reach the target.
See the special topic: Training of the mobilized: the Ministry of Defense explained how the soldiers of the Armed Forces are trained The training takes place in several stages. The Armed Forces continue to move the front line in the Kherson region The occupiers are trying to concentrate their forces on the left bank of the Dnieper. RF troops launched a rocket attack on a five-story building in Mykolaiv A children's playground, cars and a heating line were also damaged. With the “Wagner Line”, the Russians probably want to deter quick Ukrainian counterattacks – British intelligence British intelligence officers have commented on the line of defense of the occupiers, which is being built by the “Wagner” PMC. The Armed Forces destroyed 16 kamikaze drones in the Mykolaiv region The Russian Federation again attacked the south of Ukraine with Iranian drones.
