The commander of the Ukrainian Air Force, Lieutenant General Mykola Oleshchuk, recently claimed on social media ** that Ukraine successfully shot down 3 Russian Su-34 fighter-bombers using the Patriot air defense system. According to Lieutenant General Oreshchuk, the three Russian Su-34 fighters were shot down while taking off from Morozov Airport in Rostov, Russia. If this statement is true, Ukraine will set a record for the longest distance ever to kill a Russian warplane at 160 kilometers. In addition, the Ukrainian Air Force previously disclosed that they had successfully shot down 5 Russian fighter jets with the Patriot system in May.
If these reports are true, then throughout 2023, the Ukrainian Air Force has managed to shoot down 8 Russian warplanes using Patriot air defense systems. Faced with a similar situation, how will the PLA respond?The losses of the Russian army are quite normal. Actually, we don't have to pay too much attention to the losses of the Russian army. In war, the loss of ** is inevitable. Given the scale of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Russia's losses are already relatively small. According to the Ukrainian side itself, the size of the Ukrainian army is now about 1 million people.
According to the estimates of the British "Economist", the current number of people in Ukraine has reached 1.9 million. This means that the current Russia-Ukraine conflict is a large-scale war involving millions of people. However, in a war of this magnitude, the losses of the Russian air force and air defense forces are calculated in single digits, which is rare on such a battlefield scale. Basically, attrition on the battlefield is a common occurrence. Taking China's Type 99A main battle tank as an example, as one of the most advanced main battle tanks in the world, the performance of the 99A tank is beyond doubt.
From these examples, it can be seen that whether in the Russia-Ukraine conflict or other conflicts, the investment and loss of ** are inevitable. Faced with this reality, the military needs to remain vigilant and continuously improve its combat effectiveness and technical level to ensure superiority on the battlefield. If in the future, the United States arbitrarily intervenes, leading to the outbreak of war in the Taiwan Strait, forcing our military to take military action to resolve relevant issues.
The PLA Air Force carried out a comprehensive strike on military targets on the island of Taiwan, using drones and precision missiles to carry out "targeted uprooting" of all targets, and even so, it could not ensure the safety of the 99A main battle tank 100%. After all, no one can guarantee that after this series of blows, there will not be the slightest fish left on the island. 99A tank On a macro level, the Taiwan army has been defeated by the PLA, and it may not even be able to organize the battalion level, and even the first-level troop formation cannot be carried out**.
However, at the micro level, the battlefield is still full of dangers, and some of the Taiwanese troops are likely to hide somewhere and wait for an opportunity to attack the PLA. It is worth mentioning that if a Western reporter is on the island of Taiwan, he may shoot the ** that was "opened" by the 99A main battle tank **, and hype it up in Europe and the United States ** to "prove" the backwardness of the PLA's equipment. Then, domestic and foreign ** may denounce the lack of combat effectiveness of the PLA and claim that it has suffered heavy losses. The attrition of the 99A tank in this case looks extremely normal. At present, the situation of the Russian army on the battlefield is still controllable, but there are also some objective reasons for the losses suffered by the Russian army.
One of them is that there are problems with the Russian intelligence system. In the publication of the war report, the spokesman of the Ukrainian Air Force, Yuriy Ihnat, said that the main reason for the Ukrainian side to achieve results was the intelligence deception of Russia. Earlier, Ukraine deployed the Patriot system in Kyiv to protect the security of the capital. Russia's repeated strikes on Kyiv have been intercepted by the Patriot system, which has led Russia to believe that Ukraine has deployed all Patriot systems in Kyiv or its surrounding areas. Recently, Ukraine deployed a number of Patriot air defense systems in the Kherson region, a move that went undetected by the Russian military.
This led to the fact that 3 Su-34 fighters were shot down during takeoff. One of the main reasons for this is that the Russian army has not been able to obtain relevant intelligence. Another reason is that there are problems with the Su-34 fighter itself. To put it bluntly, the Su-34 is not outstanding in terms of overall performance. As a "front-line bomber", it is small in size and extremely limited in strike efficiency, far inferior to ordinary bombers. In contrast, multi-purpose fighters such as the F-15 and J-16 have greater maneuverability. Although the J-16 is inferior to the Su-34 in terms of load, it has air combat capabilities.
And the Su-34 lacks an advanced ground-to-ground radar due to the lag of Russian electronics. Thus, when carrying out aerial bombardment, it is necessary to reduce the flight altitude in order to increase accuracy, which also increases the risk of being attacked by anti-aircraft missiles. When the PLA responds to this situation of the Russian army, the entire battlefield model needs to be changed. First of all, the Russian army has been slow to react, and the military concept that the PLA has always pursued is "either you don't fight, you want to fight and you will fight", that is, if there is a war, the PLA will quickly start a war with full preparations. And Russia has dragged on the conflict in Ukraine for almost 2 years, putting enormous pressure on itself.
If the PLA were to conduct an operation, it would take a direct attack to completely destroy the opponent's military capabilities. Secondly, there is the issue of air supremacy. One of the greatest difficulties facing Russia in the current war is the lack of absolute air supremacy. From time to time, the Ukrainian side uses air defense systems to shoot down Russian fighters, which poses a threat to the Russian army. If China intervenes in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, they will try to destroy all Ukrainian air defenses. However, to achieve this, a powerful intelligence system is needed in order to know the specific location of the Ukrainian air defense system.
However, the Russian army does not have such an intelligence system, which also explains Russia's predicament in this war. Moreover, the essence of war is a violent means of political service, which Russia does not seem to recognize. At the same time, the external environment and geopolitical situation that Russia faced before the war became even worse, suggesting that Russia did not fully consider the political and diplomatic aspects of the war when fighting this war. If China is in the position of Russia, then the Russian-Ukrainian conflict will most likely not happen.
The above point is based on the Global Times's "Burst!"."Shoot down 3 Su-34s at once" and Air Force Wings' "Chinese: Analytic Platypus".