For weeks, Russia threatened airstrikes on the West's shipments of heavy military hardware into Ukraine. What has puzzled is that that it failed to follow up with those strikes. Until yesterday. Russia finally hit five rail venues and fuel depots in western and central Ukraine.
Nevertheless, I have wondered why the lengthy delay in Russian airstrikes on Western war matériel that soon will be blasting the aggressor back to Moscow. As I noted in the previous post, the U.S. is shipping tanks and assorted missile systems into Ukraine; Germany is sending dozens of armored antiaircraft vehicles; and Britain is piling on, sending yet more armored vehicles capable of downing jets and helicopters. One would think Russia's greatest urgency in eastern Ukraine would be to bomb this hardware in western Ukraine.
Yet, weeks passed — even though the hardware has flowed eastwardly for quite a while now — and no damaging airstrikes, not until Monday. Why? From military analysts, the perfectly unpuzzling answers are rolling out with clarity, although the answers have been no real secret for some time.
First, they say, Russian pilots are leery of the very equipment that Ukraine has been receiving: air-defense capabilities that can blast the pilots, too, back to Moscow, and not all in one piece. Furthermore, say analysts, Russia must preserve what long-range precision missiles it has, which aren't that many.
Russian supplies of such weaponry as Kalibr and Iskander precision missiles "aren’t necessarily large," says Dmitry Gorenburg, a Russia specialist at the U.S. military think tank and research institute CNA. And "they are using them up, and they don’t want to use them all because that would weaken their ability to fight NATO."
That is a most unlikely prospect, but Putin is paranoid and a bit unhinged when it comes to believing the West is the true, sprawling "evil empire." He just never knows when Evil might strike — insert The Twilight Zone's theme music here.
As understandable as that explanation is for Russia's airstrike delays, there's another reason. Let's just say that Russian military commanders seem to comprehend that their country is pretty bad at precision-missile strikes. Or as former Pentagon official and CIA officer Mick Mulroy put it in military jargon, the Russians are "not very good at dynamic targeting" — that is, striking targets in motion, rather than sitting like helpless ducks.
Russia's military would be wise to bone up on the martial science of precision strikes, and soon. Because the West's heavy military supplies are flowing into Ukraine with what U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin calls "unimaginable speed." Except it's not unimaginable. It's being done, on Ukraine's railway system and roads in the west.
Added Mulroy: "The fight for Donbas will be won or lost primarily on logistics: weapons, equipment and ammunition. There have to be uninterrupted supply lines from the U.S. and NATO." That is now the West's greatest challenge, as it is Russia's.