Ukraine-Russia war is unequal battle: Russians can wipe out Ukrainian units in seconds

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelinski tried to call his Russian colleague quickly on Wednesday, when all the signals were already on red. The Russians quickly evacuated their embassy in Kiev and the Ukrainians were ‘crippled’ by a cyber attack. A Russian attack seemed only a matter of time. Zelinski, well aware that his army is no match for the Russians, failed. Putin did not answer the phone. Hours later, the battle Ukraine so feared began.

All the statistics have made it painfully clear for months that the estimated 200,000 strong Ukrainian army is no match for nuclear power Russia. But the difference in numbers of soldiers, fighter planes, tanks, armored vehicles and attack helicopters is not everything. Also in Afghanistan, the difference in strength with the mujahideen was enormous after the Russian invasion of 1979. And yet ten years later, after more than ten thousand war dead, the Russians had to leave Afghanistan with their tails between their legs.

However, the unwieldy, entrenched and demoralized Soviet army of that time is no more. In its place has come a fighting force that, following the American lead, has embraced high-tech weapons and new combat tactics. The Russian army is now bombarding enemy targets over a thousand kilometers away with Kalibr cruise missiles, as happened against IS in Syria.

stealth planes

The Air Force flies with so-called stealth aircraft, which are difficult to detect for radar, such as the Su-57 and other advanced combat aircraft. The Russians even claim to be the first in the world to have a hypersonic weapon operational. The Avangard would race toward its target at a minimum of four thousand miles per hour.

Against this military superiority is a Ukrainian army that still largely uses weapons from the Soviet era. The most modern fighter of the Ukrainian Air Force, for example, is the MiG-29, an aircraft from the eighties of the last century. To make matters worse, Kiev only has a few dozen of these fighter jets at its disposal. The pilots they fly also have to fear for the Russian anti-aircraft system S-400, which can shoot down aircraft up to 400 kilometers away.

To counter the massive invasion force, Kiev has now pinned its hopes on US missiles to inflict grievous losses on the Russians, hoping to stop or slow them down. The US and other allies have supplied hundreds of Javelin missiles to take out Russia’s T-72 tanks. Kiev also now has the equally effective anti-aircraft missile Stinger, an American weapon that already instilled much fear in Russian airmen during the Afghanistan war.

big losses

In particular, the confidence of the Ukrainians in the Javelin, one of the world’s best anti-tank missiles, is high. With this missile, the Russian tanks can be destroyed from a very great distance, up to about four kilometers. “Javelins in Kiev!” Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov tweeted enthusiastically in January, as an undisclosed amount of anti-tank missiles were delivered by the US to the capital.

The Russian tank units, which entered Ukraine near Belgorod on Thursday, should rightly fear the Javelin. The anti-tank missile, as it turned out during the deployment by the US in Iraq, among other places, is very effective in destroying heavy equipment. The Ukrainians hope to inflict heavy losses on Russian tank units in open terrain.

But they are also vulnerable in the cities. The Russians still have bad memories of their tank deployment in the battle for Grozny in the 1990s, when Chechen fighters showed how vulnerable Russian tanks were.