You cannot fight a summer offensive when you have 100km long gaps in your air defenses, period, end of story. If russia tries it will just destroy them faster.
Frankly it is kind of hilarious that the international media thinks there will be.
An air defense gap like this is a bigger problem than just the missing gap itself, it makes russia trying to locate and plug gaps elsewhere in their air defense network by working backwards from Ukraine strikes an impossible task because maybe all the drones came from that huge air defense gap? Or maybe they exploited another route russia isn’t aware is not adequately defended?
The uncertainty snowballs quick.
Well yes but the confounding thing is, when you lose an air war like this you don’t just lose locally, you lose catastrophically everywhere.
I think the collapsing of russian air defenses doesn’t just mean that more than Crimea can be liberated, it means that russia cannot stop Ukraine from choosing where and when conflict will happen.
Once you take out all the russian air defenses in one area russia is forced to still operate in then you take out all the capacity russia has to even get air defenses into the area, then you take out the command centers that would request the air defenses to come into the area, then you blow up the air defense logistics depot far behind the frontline, then blow up the factory making and repairing the air defense systems. This process inherently snowballs.
Ukraine has already raced all the way up this chain and it demonstrates that the russian military might has critically collapsed. Yes it sort of happened from short and long range strikes converging on midrange dominance from both sides for Ukraine, but the idea is still the same.
The end state, which is the failure state of a modern organized military when subjected to overwhelming and sustained air power, is when it becomes a dubious proposition for russia to even concentrate logistics because there is a very good chance the logistics point has already been compromised and will be blown up from a drone streaking out of a hostile sky from an unpredictable direction once the russian depot builds up enough material and personnel that Ukraine decides it is time to spring that particular trap.
An air war like this is fundamentally about destroying your enemies assets faster than they can produce them, while building your own assets faster than they’re destroyed. If one part gets an upper hand in that balance, it will inherently snowball quickly, since that party is getting more assets for each day, while the enemy has fewer assets for each day. The most crucial component here is probably your manufacturing capacity for weapons systems.
Of course, it takes a lot of time for this to materialise when russia has had so deep stores of weapons. Hopefully, we’re seeing a long-term effect of Ukraine having a larger manufacturing capacity for air defence assets than russia. If they actually have that, it’s also because their manufacturing capacity has grown very fast, which means the discrepancy will only increase. The tipping point is when Ukraine is both manufacturing air defence capabilities faster than russia, and are increasing their manufacturing capacity faster.
Of course, but Crimea has been one of the top sites to protect (with Moscow, St-Petersburg, …) so yes exactly, and when Crimea is ripe, the rest will be hanging in there on a thread at best!