Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi is the ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee. In his position on the Committee, Senator Wicker recently issued remarks supporting the surging of lethal aid to Ukraine “to push back Russian forces as they apply new pressure on the nation’s defenses.” He noted that the aid to Ukraine has been cost effective in cutting Russia’s military capabilities and without expending American lives. He noted: “As they prevent chaos spreading further into Europe, the Ukrainian armed forces are also significantly degrading the military capability of our chief adversaries, Putin’s dictatorship. …American interests are being secured without U.S. boots on the ground and for a relatively modest cost.”
However, as Senator Wicker also told the Committee February 28: “We are at a pivotal moment in this war.” Just how pivotal became more apparent Easter day when leaked Pentagon briefing papers appeared in the New York Times. According to the Times one of the leaked documents reveals it was the Pentagon’s assessment in late February that, “Stocks of missiles for Soviet-era S-300 and Buk air defense systems, which make up 89 percent of Ukraine’s protection against most fighter aircraft and some bombers, were projected to be fully depleted by May 3 and mid-April.”
The Easter news on a growing gap in Ukraine’s air defenses is an alarm bell in the night for Ukraine and its allies in NATO. General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, observed in February: “The Russian Army has been mauled, but the Russian Air Force has not.” Indeed, according to one of the leaked documents, the Russian Air Force in the Ukraine area remains full strength at 485 planes compared with 85 Ukrainian jets.
So far Russia’s Air Force has largely kept its distance from Ukraine’s in-country air defenses to avoid further losses of MIGS. Russia though has kept up a concerted effort to drain Ukraine’s air defenses by constant drone and cruise missile attacks. As the Times reported Easter day: “But without a huge influx of munitions, Ukraine’s entire air defense network, weakened by repeated barrages from Russian drones and missiles, could fracture, according to U.S. officials and newly leaked Pentagon documents, potentially allowing Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to unleash his lethal fighter jets in ways that could change the course of the war.”
All this just as Ukraine is preparing to mass recently acquired armor and troops trained in combined arms in a make or break it counteroffensive to reacquire its occupied territories.
Plugging Ukraine’s threatened gap in air defenses is an emergency that must be addressed by NATO while Ukraine faces off against Russian barbarism. Anne Applebaum is a staff writer for The Atlantic and whose books have chronicled the history of Stalin’s starving the people of Ukraine of food in 1932-33, and the creation of the Russian Gulag.
This past December in The Atlantic she described graphically what would have befallen Ukraine had the Russians been allowed to take the entire country: “Had all that happened as planned [by Putin], Ukraine would now be pockmarked with the concentration camps, torture chambers and makeshift prisons that have been discovered in Bucha, Izyum, Kherson, and all the other territories temporarily occupied by Russia and liberated by the Ukrainian army.” Undoubtedly mass graves of Ukrainians await discovery in the still unliberated parts of Ukraine such as the totally Russian destroyed city of Mariupol.
The recent decapitation of a Ukrainian prisoner by Russian forces under Wagner Group’s Yevgeny Prigozhian shows there is no bottom to Russian degradation and barbarism—a barbarism as Anne Applebaum shows was created by over a hundred years of practically non-stop Soviet and later Russian propaganda that propagate the lie that Ukraine is not a real country. As she wrote in April 2022, Russia uses language to objectify Ukrainian opponents as less than human beings who can be wiped out.
As Applebaum writes, the antecedents of Putin’s violence are Soviet: “All of this—the indifference to violence, the amoral nonchalance about mass murder—is familiar to anyone who knows Soviet history.” (Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic, April 25 and December 22, 2022).
So, the gap in Ukraine’s air defenses must be addressed quickly, and if possible before the spring offensive exposes Ukraine’s massed armor and troops to Russian air attacks. The Washington Post reports that the Biden Administration’s latest package of weapons for Ukraine appears to acknowledge the threat by including gun trucks with cannons to knock down drones. The Administration also announced an accelerated delivery of the Patriot air defense system following compressed training for Ukrainians at Fort Sill Oklahoma.
US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said April 12 he is confident Ukraine has “much of the capability it needs” to continue its success. Let’s hope that is true. But I worry. The US and NATO must see that the serious gap in Ukraine’s air defenses revealed by the Pentagon leaks is plugged in short order—and before Ukraine masses troops and armor for the offensive that is coming. In Ukraine, truly there is no substitute for victory. Russian barbarism is already past the gates of Ukraine, is trampling over its European freedoms and decency, and is pressing hard on Moldova and Georgia. Ukraine with NATO’s assistance must remove its occupiers and stop Russia’s advance. Senator Wicker, the Armed Services Committee he serves, and NATO have their work cut out to address Ukraine’s air defenses. However, plugging the reported air defense gap is urgent work that must be done promptly before Ukraine armor and troops are exposed in an offensive to Russia’s doing its worst to stop them.
Robert P. Wise is a Northsider.
