I think the core issue for Russia is that Ukrainian have brought the cost of strikes so low that vital supply routes are being struck at with impunity going towards Crimea. The lines and high cost of fuel is not a blip or short term thing. Those fp-2s are so simple there's no way to stop them from being manufactured, retribution strikes will do nothing for slowing down the fire control Ukraine has over the major roads.
Any major AA systems being fed into the peninsula is basically just drone bait at this point, not sure this is something solvable by Russia. You going to have a guy on a AA mount behind every fuel truck headed to Crimea?
There are many things the Russians could be doing to make their lives much easier in terms of dealing with these Ukrainian attacks. Some of these they are not doing for political reasons, some for technical reasons, and some apparently for pride reasons.
The far and away biggest and most effective thing the Russians can do that will bring an almost immediate massive relief is to stop the Ukrainians from using NATO ISR assets in their kill chain while operating right up to Russian national airspace.
If the Ukrainians can’t have uninterrupted, timely and high precision tracking and targeting data, the effectiveness of their drone attacks will fall off a cliff and/or the costs of such drone attacks will skyrocket.
The second most impactful thing the Russians can do is rush build AWACS and get them on station. That will give them much longer reaction times so they can vector in air and other assets to interdict Ukrainian drone swarms to deal with the saturation attacks style they have been using to overwhelm Russia’s stretched defences. They can home grow these, or they can swallow their pride and just cobble some together North Korean style using Chinese components.
Finally, they can swallow their pride and formally request to buy Chinese weapons. While China has refrained from giving lethal aid to Russia, China has also reiterated its position that it has the right to normal trade with Russia, which includes weapons. To me, it looks like that thus far the Russians have been too prideful to ask China to purchase weapons at a high enough level and China is just shrugging and saying we are not going to go out of our way to incur the wrath of the Europeans to help you out if you can’t even bring yourself to ask us for our help.
But the timing is actually ripening for such a move as the Europeans cannot help themselves from needlessly pissing China off, and have repeatedly shown beyond doubt that despite Trump, they are happy to be America’s abused bitch. At the same time European economic performance continue to circle the toilet and the EU market is becoming increasingly marginal to China. So at this point I don’t think China would be particularly bothered about giving the EU a massive fuck-off slap, especially if the Russians time their ask right just as the EU launches a new fresh provocation against China.
Indeed, I would suggest that China has been following Britain’s 6 Step guide to destroying Empires pretty damn closely, and supplying arms to Russia on a truly industrial scale for a direct clash with NATO actually ticks multiple boxes on that checklist.
- rent an army (the Russians)
- fight in a periphery theatre (Europe)
- don’t fight the enemy main force (America) directly (could be easily done by raising tensions in East Asia at the same time and make it look like China is about to move on Taiwan to pin the bulk of American military power in the Pacific; why not also co-ordinate with Iran to kick things off in the ME again got good measure).
I don’t think this has escaped the notice of the Europeans, least of which the British, which is why we are starting to hear alarm bells being rung about the risk of Russia preparing for a direct clash with NATO.
