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It has been a striking week of progress for Ukrainian forces in a war that had appeared to be in a grinding stalemate. In a dual-axis offensive, Kyiv’s forces have suddenly conducted a near-blitzkrieg level operation in the oblast of Kharkiv, near Ukraine’s second largest city, that has resulted in retaking over 6,000 square km of territory seized by the Russians since the start of the war in February.
Most military analysts in the west were pleasantly surprised, while there has been rumblings of real discontent among even the most ardent supporters of Vladimir Putin in Moscow. What happened, and will Ukrainian successes continue as the fall unfolds?
First and most importantly, the massive weapons systems delivered to the Ukrainians by the U.S. and our NATO allies are now having decisive effect on the battlefield. Most dramatically, the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) is confounding Russian defenses. It allows extremely precise destruction of critical Russian logistic nodes, negating the advantage Moscow has in conventional artillery pieces.
But beyond HIMARS, there are a plethora of modern NATO military systems which the Ukrainians have quickly mastered, ranging from air defense systems protecting Ukrainian forces on the ground to high tech missiles that can destroy Russian aircraft and radars. While NATO has thus far declined to transfer high speed jets to the Ukrainians (discussions continue concerning both MIG-29s and F-16s), the airspace over much of Ukraine remains contested, taking away another critical advantage Russia assumed it would have.
The ground campaign has been significantly aided by the transfer to the Ukrainians of highly capable small unmanned offensive aircraft, including for the Switchblade “suicide drone” and other variants that have led to the destruction of numerous Russian tanks and armored…
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Source : time
