[Tee tiong huat]

U.S. and Ukraine Search for a New Strategy After Failed Counteroffensiv


https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/11/us/po...ategy.html

Ukrainian Crews Set A Complex Missile Trap For Russia’s Best Radar Plane....“Who did this?” Sat night....the Ukrainian air force quipped. The answer, it seems, is the air arm’s 90-mile-range Patriot PAC-2 air-defense missiles. Less likely: shorter-range Patriot PAC-3s or S-300s. Exactly how Ukrainians shot down the four-engine A-50 with its top-mounted radar is unclear, but analyst Tom Cooper—who has written many books about Soviet and Russian warplanes—has a theory....?.?.?.

This is for Putin to miscalculatvled! is not only a self-inflicted, it also to kill and also thus this time killing his own.... Tongue   (part 1)

If Cooper’s theory is correct, Ukrainians set trap on Saturday, Ukrainian air force jets—presumably Sukhoi Su-24 bombers—struck Russian air force installations across Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula. “A number of radars were knocked out,” Cooper says. Then Saturday strikes is latest in a long campaign of raids on Russian defenses on Crimea, suppressed Russians’ ground-based radar coverage, leaving surviving missile batteries on peninsula partially blind—especially north, where terrain could mask incoming Ukrainian planes, drones & missiles. So Russian commanders did the obvious, (but a very stupid, thing). So ordered one of their few remaining A-50U radar planes, which normally fly far to the south over the Sea of Azov, to push farther north in order to extend radar coverage over most of Crimea. An A-50’s rotating radar can see airplane-size targets nearly 200 miles away.

A four-prop Ilyushin Il-22M airborne command post with around 10 crew aboard accompanied the A-50. The Il-22 is a radio-relay platform; its crew assists the A-50’s crew by handling communications and data-transfer for which the A-50 lacks the power and processing.

Satellite imagery and radar data seem to place the A-50’s northernmost flight path over occupied Berdyansk, just 75 miles from the front line. That’s within range of the single Patriot surface-to-air missile battery, out of three in the arsenal, that the Ukrainian air force has deployed along the southern front.

The trick was for the Ukrainians to target the A-50 and its accompanying Il-22 without giving the Russian crews too much advance notice of the attack—and without sacrificing their precious Patriot system.

“All Ukrainians had to do was to secretly deploy a suitable SAM system to target the two aircraft from long range,” Cooper wrote. “Perhaps this was one of [air force’s] S-300 SAM systems. Perhaps one of [the air force’s] PAC-2/3 SAM systems.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/20...dar-plane/