Here’s the weaponry that Russian forces have ready for an invasion–and how Ukraine fights back.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has staged more than half of the Russian army’s ground forces, as many as 150,000 soldiers, along Ukraine’s borders.
Analysts warn that more than a thousand tanks, hundreds of artillery pieces and scores of attack planes and helicopters could accompany this force.
The Ukrainian army outnumbers the Russians. But the Ukrainians’ weaponry—much of it leftover from the 1980s, when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union—is older, slower and less lethal than what Russia can bring to bear.
The potential invasion force could attack along several fronts: north from Crimea, which Russia wrenched from Ukrainian control in 2014; west across Ukraine’s Donbas region, where anti-government separatists have waged a grinding war against Kyiv’s brigades since shortly after the annexation of Crimea; or south from Belarus and west from the Russian-controlled Transnistria region of Moldova.
Yes, the Ukrainian armed forces have the natural advantages every defender enjoys against an invader. Familiar terrain. Shorter supply lines. The support of the local population. It’s possible, however, that none of those advantages will matter. The Russian army can concentrate more firepower per mile of front than any other army in the world.
Technology, tactics and doctrine are the vehicles for waging war. What follows is a survey of the key weapons systems the Russians and Ukrainians are deploying for a possible clash, the tactics their operators might attempt and the Soviet doctrine that guides how both sides conduct war.
A column of Ukrainian T-64BM Bulat tanks, which are a modernized version of a 1983 model that boasts better reactive armor, a new gun and a locally made night sight.
Sergii Popsuievych/Alamy
Tanks
The Russian army has massed around 1,200 tanks for a possible invasion of Ukraine. The tanks include the latest T-90s plus upgraded T-80s and T-72s.
Across the border, the Ukrainian army has mobilized its own armor for a possible defensive campaign. Ukraine possesses some of the same tank models that Russia does, but Kyiv’s best tank, an updated T-64, is uniquely Ukrainian.
It’s a Cold War relic designed in a factory that Ukraine inherited when the Soviet Union broke up. Kyiv has upgraded hundreds of 1980s vintage T-64s with better reactive armor, improved night sights and other features.
The upgraded T-64s are, in principle, technologically superior to most Russian tanks. But it’s useless comparing one tank to another when the two might never meet in battle.
Don’t expect a lot of tank-on-tank fighting between Ukraine’s aging T-64s and Russia’s newer T-90s. Tanks destroying other tanks makes for exciting cinema, but in actual warfare opposing armor seldom clashes. That’s especially true in Ukraine, where both sides follow Soviet doctrine.
That means that artillery, not tanks or infantry, is the decisive force. The other combat arms exist to position the artillery for the most devastating barrages, and to exploit the holes the guns smash in enemy defenses.
READ MORE ABOUT THE TANKS OF THE UKRAINE WAR
A Russian 2S7 fires during a military exercise. Ukraine also operates the mammoth Soviet-era self-propelled howitzers, which have a 203 mm-diameter barrel, but the Russian army has modernized its arsenal with a sophisticated fire control system that allows them to fire more rapidly — and accurately — than the Ukrainian models.
Kirill Kukhmar/TASS/Getty Images
Artillery
The war in Donbas is, more than anything, an artillery war. If Putin orders his troops to widen the conflict, big guns would probably play an even bigger role.
As long as they follow Soviet doctrine, both sides would emphasize what military practitioners call “fires”—the concentration and exchange of heavy artillery.
The Ukrainian and Russian armies have in common many of the same guns and supporting artillery systems. But the Russians can bring their artillery to bear much faster than the Ukrainians can.
Consider the 2S7 self-propelled howitzer, which is the biggest gun in both armies. The 2S7 can shoot as far as 30 miles. It saw combat in Afghanistan in the 1980s and the Chechen wars of the ’90s.
The Russians eventually put a lot of their roughly 300 2S7s in storage. The Ukrainians did the same with the 100 or so 2S7s they inherited from the Soviet Union. While the big gun packs a wallop, it’s also heavy, slow-to-fire, hard to support and painfully loud for the 14-person crew.
But the fighting in Donbas that started in 2014 compelled the Ukrainian army to reactivate a lot of older equipment. The army pulled at least 13 2S7s out of storage and sent them for overhaul.
There’s a problem for the Ukrainian gunners. The Russians still have 2S7s of their own. And they can fire faster and more accurately than the Ukrainian guns, owing to the sophisticated fire-control system the Russians have developed in recent years. That system combines drones and ground-based radars and electronic eavesdroppers to spot targets, and sturdy radio links to relay coordinates to the guns.
In brutal fighting over the town of Debaltseve in early 2015, Russian 2S7s and other big guns hammered Ukrainian troops. “Ukrainians claimed that for every salvo they fired, they received 10 to 15 salvos in return,” according to Small Wars Journal. “Accounts of Ukrainian soldiers being targeted by artillery, just seconds after being spotted by a [unmanned aerial vehicle] or after making use of their phones, were numerous over the course of the battle.”
In addition to 2S7s, the Russians and Ukrainians deploy hundreds of other artillery pieces plus rocket launchers and surface-to-surface ballistic missiles. If the Russians attack, watch these guns and rockets. The side that can position and aim its artillery faster could gain the advantage.
With this caveat: It’s one thing to deploy a howitzer and feed its crew targets, it’s quite another to keep a steady supply of heavy shells flowing from supply depots to the front. The Ukrainians long have struggled to build up adequate stockpiles of artillery ammunition. The Russians, meanwhile, might not have enough trucks to speedily transport ammo from railheads to the front.
READ MORE ABOUT THE BIG GUNS OF THE UKRAINE WAR
Russia’s 2K22 Tunguska is a tracked, low-altitude anti-aircraft system packing twin cannons and launchers for eight infrared-guided missiles that can range six miles out and two miles up. It’s a key part of the layered air defense systems that accompany Russian battalion tactical groups.
Sergei Savostyanov/TASS/Getty Images
Air Defenses
The war in the separatist-controlled Donbas in eastern Ukraine is first and foremost a ground war. A wider war in Ukraine might not be any different. The Ukrainian battle zone is an extremely dangerous place for aircraft of all sorts—for one major reason. Both sides deploy powerful air-defense systems.
“Russia has fielded the most modern integrated ground-based tactical air-defense system on the planet,” Lester Grau and Charles Bartles detailed in their definitive The Russian Way of War. Every brigade—each with up to four 900-person battalion tactical groups—travels with an air-defense battalion. That battalion is stacked with surface-to-air missiles and guns.
Russian front-line air-defenses are fairly self-sufficient. The air-defense battalion’s radars can warn them of approaching aircraft, but the batteries themselves fire infrared- or command-guided missiles that don’t require radar.
“The intent of this dense air-defense is to deny the enemy use of helicopter gunships, fighter-bombers, cruise missiles and unmanned aerial systems,” Grau and Bartles wrote.
During bitter fighting over the airport in Donetsk in the spring of 2014, Kyiv’s Mi-24 and Mi-8 helicopters and Su-25, Su-27 and MiG-29 fighters inflicted heavy casualties on separatists dug in at the airport, softening them up ahead of the ground assault. “The combined air-land offensive overpowered the separatists and pushed them from the airport,” U.S. Army Major Amos Fox wrote in a 2019 study of the battle.
The Kremlin took note. Over the next few months, the Russians supplied the separatists with Strela shoulder-fired missiles. Russian air-defense troops with heavier equipment—Buk surface-to-air missile systems—rolled across the border into Donbas. In July 2014, a Buk attached to a separatist force mistakenly shot down a Malaysian airliner, killing 298 people.
Ukrainian pilots flew into the same wall of steel that claimed the airliner. In all, 63 Ukrainians died in three shoot-downs that spring. Kyiv pulled back its planes and helicopters. “It is almost impossible to find any mention of Ukrainian aircraft on the battlefield after August 2014,” Fox wrote.
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The Ukrainian Air Force’s Su-27 Flankers, despite their advanced age, are still some of the most powerful interceptors in the region. But it’s not clear Ukraine’s leaders will risk losing them in an air battle they may believe they can’t win.
John Baker/Newscom
Fighter Jets
Ina wider war in Ukraine, Russian aircrews could face the same extreme risk as Ukrainian crews. But that doesn’t mean brave pilots on both sides won’t persevere.
The Ukrainians, however, would start out at a serious disadvantage. The Russian air force can deploy hundreds of modern fighters and attack planes over Ukraine, and might even sortie bombers to lob long-range missiles at Ukrainian targets without ever going anywhere near the war zone.
The Ukrainian air force at best can muster just 125 front-line warplanes. Of these, 71 are fighters. Of the fighters, the 34 active twin-engine Su-27s and their expert pilots stand the best chance of making any dent at all in the punishing bombing campaign that could precede a wider Russian offensive across Ukraine’s Donbas region.
The best of the supersonic Su-27s, and best pilots, belong to a single brigade with two squadrons, based at Mirgorod in north-central Ukraine east of the Dnieper River, which bisects the country from north to south.
If the 831st Tactical Aviation Brigade’s Su-27s rise to meet Russian planes, it’s a sign that the Ukrainian air force, which has sat out the campaign in Donbas since suffering heavy losses in 2015, intends to fight.
With their supersonic speed, 60-mile-range radars and R-27 air-to-air missiles, Kyiv’s Su-27s, despite their advanced age, are still some of the most powerful interceptors in the region. But that doesn’t mean they’ll last long against the Russians.
Ukraine’s twin-engine Su-25 ground attack jets might fall even faster. During its brief, doomed air campaign against Russian-backed separatists in Donbas in 2014 and 2015, the beleaguered Ukrainian air force lost five of its slow Su-25s, which are devoted to close-air-support of ground troops.
The losses underscored the Su-25s’ vulnerability. Their tough airframe and comparatively thick armor can’t save them when the very nature of their mission requires flying straight into some of the most dangerous airspace on Earth.
After restoring many of its old, grounded Su-25s, the Ukrainian air force now operates around 31 of the planes in a single brigade at Mykolaiv on the Black Sea coast. Another dozen or so remain in storage.
The Russian air force, for its part, has nearly 200 Su-25s. Around 80 of them are within easy striking range of Ukraine.
During an earlier phase of the build-up last spring, the Russians staged Su-25s at airfields closer to Ukraine before pulling them back in May. It would take just a few days at most to return scores of the planes to forward bases. One squadron recently deployed to Belarus for an exercise and might stick around, placing it close to the potential front line.
The Ukrainians, meanwhile, are preparing for war. Kyiv’s own Su-25 pilots took part in a large-scale air exercise in December. During the war game, they showed off their signature, ultra-low flying—a profile that’s supposed to help them avoid detection by enemy gunners until the jets are directly overhead.
It’s uncertain that low flying will save them.
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The Russian guided missile cruiser Marshal Ustinov, seen here, is a sister ship to the Moskva, which is the most powerful warship in Russia’s Black Sea fleet.
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Warships
The Ukrainian army has the means to resist, if not halt, a wider Russian assault on Ukraine. The Ukrainian air force is outnumbered and outgunned, but still could fight.
At sea, however, Kyiv’s meager fleet is hopelessly outclassed by the vastly superior Russian navy. The Ukrainian navy operates exactly one major surface combatant. And “major” is a relative term in this case.
What good is the frigate Hetman Sahaydachniy? She doesn’t stand a chance against the overwhelming might of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, which can deploy five frigates, various corvettes, at least six diesel-electric attack submarines and, most notably, the cruiser Slava.
Arguably the only reason Hetman Sahaydachniy survived Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea is that, at the time of the Russian attack, she was away on deployment, helping NATO defend against pirates around the Horn of Africa.
The 3,500-ton Krivak III-class frigate, commissioned in 1993, is equally powerless to halt a full-scale Russian invasion, which experts warn could involve an amphibious assault on the Ukrainian coast.
If Putin pulls the proverbial trigger and orders a wider attack on Ukraine, Russian naval infantry could attack along the Ukrainian coast at the same time a Russian tank army rolls west through Donbas and north from Crimea. A successful attack could entirely cut off Ukraine from the Black Sea and adjacent Sea of Azov, effectively making the country land-locked.
The Russian navy could assemble nearly a dozen Ropucha– and Alligator-class landing ships plus a half-dozen small landing craft. The guided missile cruiser Moskva might sail with the amphibs in order to protect them.
Think of Moskva as a 12,500-ton, 612-foot mobile missile battery with nearly 500 people aboard. She packs enough anti-ship missiles to wipe out the entire Ukrainian navy and enough air-defense missiles to swat away any conceivable aerial attack on the Black Sea Fleet’s amphibious flotilla.
Moskva’s value could make her a top target of Ukraine’s locally made Neptune anti-ship missiles. Assuming the Ukrainians can preserve their few anti-ship missiles through Russian bombardment and also pinpoint Moskva’s location using radars or drones, they might get to take a few shots at the cruiser.
Russian weaknesses
The Russians aren’t invulnerable. In nearly a decade of bitter fighting, the Ukrainians have figured out the major weaknesses in a typical Russian battalion tactical group. If Ukrainian battalions can exploit these weaknesses, they might be able to slow the Russian assault—if not halt it—despite Russia’s likely control of the air and sea.
The key is manpower. The Russian army organizes its BTGs to leverage artillery firepower, a traditional Russian strength, while preserving the army’s most precious resource: skilled professional infantry.
In a conflict such as that in Ukraine’s Donbas region, Russian regulars fight alongside local paramilitaries—in this case, anti-government separatists from the Luhansk and Donetsk “people’s republics.”
Ukrainian regular-army successes exist in sufficient number to suggest that Russian battalion tactical groups present vulnerabilities that can be exploited, U.S. Army Capt. Nicolas Fiore explained in a 2017 paper for Armor, the official magazine of the Army’s tank corps.
If a Ukrainian commander can mobilize enough forces to keep the Russian regulars in place and also organize a counterattack, he might be able to maneuver around the regulars in order to hit a BTG where its defenses are weakest. That is, wherever proxy forces are in charge of security.
It’s a tough ask. Kyiv’s troops could run out of missiles, planes and artillery shells before they run out of the will to fight. There are methods of countering Russia’s battlefield advantages. But these methods depend on an adequate supply of ammo and weapons.
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Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2022/02/16/how-the-russians-crush-ukraine-and-how-ukraine-thwartsthem/