Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has said the death of Yevgeny Prigozhin – the Russian mercenary leader whose plane crashed weeks after he led a mutiny against Moscow’s military leadership – shows what happens when people make deals with Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
As Ukraine’s counteroffensive moves into a fourth month, with only modest gains to show so far, Zelensky told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria he rejected suggestions it was time to negotiate peace with the Kremlin.
“When you want to have a compromise or a dialogue with somebody, you cannot do it with a liar,” Volodymyr Zelensky said.
Except, at the end of the day, someone runs out of soldiers. If Ukraine keeps wasting resources in a futile counteroffensive, it’s going to be Ukraine. Military doctrine going back centuries has told us that defending is far easier if your technological capability is even marginally close to equivalent.
Ukraine is getting fully functional F-16s, Russia has already shown that they tape down Garmin GPSs to their fighter jet dashboards. That’s… not “marginally close”.
Maybe Ukraine should regroup and stay on the defensive in the meantime, but I wouldn’t bet on Russia in 2024.
Except… It sort of is? GPS was first launched in 1978 (oh look, the year the F-16 was introduced). The F-16 is an ancient platform and Ukraine has already shown that CAS is rather challenging given how advanced modern munitions are. At the start of the war they were literally plucking planes out of the sky.
Plus, NATO doctrine relies on complete battlefield superiority and complex logistics… Things that Ukraine lacks. How exactly is Ukraine supposed to turn the tides with F-16s when the Russians have stealth planes and hundreds of Su-35/34/30s?
It’s not about how old is the platform, it’s about what you put into it. Is the F-35 still randomly rebooting mid flight? The F-16 hasn’t had that problem for decades, and it can run modern hardware just fine.
Stealth planes are irrelevant in a dogfight, or in defending ground assets, and all those Su-* have been shown to be lacking proper maintenance for decades. We’ll see how they manage against a fully operational and updated bunch of F-16s.
