Remember that scene in the film Braveheart when the English chase the Scots into a wall with no way out, only to see many more Scots towering above them on cliffs about to attack? That’s what Ukrainian anti-aircraft forces are doing to the Russian Air Force, executing traps.
Getting bombed by your own side is never a great thing for troop morale, but definitely matches what we have seen with the Russian Air Force operating procedures. https://t.co/VAYfm7eX23 [1]
— OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) March 23, 2022 [2]
FNC: “The U.S. can best support Ukraine by providing it with weapons, planes and parts to defend its airspace rather than establish a no-fly zone, a U.S. Air Force expert told Fox News Digital.
Experts described the country’s strategy as luring Russian planes into air defense traps, which likely amounted to Ukrainian planes pretending to retreat and luring Russian planes into areas where ground forces then fire from both sides and annihilate the pursuing fighters.”
“[The Ukrainians] are fighting with basically two very large feathers in their cap: one is the munitions we’re providing them and the other is the morale that they can sustain on their own,” said John (JV) Venable, a veteran Air Force commander and senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation.
“By giving them the right weapons, we boost their morale, we give them wins, we allow them to bloody Russia’s nose and make this a very costly endeavor.
“The weight that people are talking about – they don’t understand how much this would take and how very involved we would become right away,” Venable, who commanded the largest combat group in the U.S. Air Force in 2004 and 2005, said about establishing a no-fly zone. “This is not a matter of will; it’s a matter of judgment, and we can do a lot of things that are more effective other than … getting into a fight with a nuclear-armed Russia.
“To allow the Ukrainians to continue pushing those sorties forward is a big feather we can put in their hat,” Venable said. “When I tell you that the MiG-29s are less effective, I mean that – with one exception … Any time you hear a friendly fighter or see one of your own birds flying overhead, and you’re in a firefight, it gives you a surge of energy.”
“Ukraine has been effective in the sky because we operate on our own land,” Yuriy Ihnat, a spokesman for the Ukrainian Air Force, told media. “The enemy flying into our airspace is flying into the zone of our air defense systems.”