Potemkin on the Dnieper: the Failure of Russian Airpower in the Ukraine war

Russia’s airpower failure in the Ukraine war was due to incompetent air campaigning and execution, coupled with the success of a highly effective Ukrainian ground-based air defense. The Russian Air Forces (VKS) attempted to execute what they term a ‘Strategic Air Operation’ based on a ‘non-contact’ doctrine, articulated widely in recent years. But they could not achieve this in practice. As a result, like the famous Potemkin Village of Catherine the Great’s time, Russia’s Air Force today is only a façade of a modern twenty-first-century Air Force. Throughout the first eight months of the invasion, Russia failed to achieve air superiority, failed at suppression of enemy air defense, and failed to deny the use of airpower to its adversary. The absence of Russian airpower was prominently on display during the September 2022 counterattack in the Kharkiv area, where Ukraine took back 3,000 plus square miles of its territory and again with the counteroffensives in the south, where Ukraine retook Kherson. This paper explores both the ‘how’ of Russia’s airpower failure along with ‘why’ it could not execute its own stated doctrine.