Russians retain capabilities for massive airstrikes, but now they are limited, - expert
Date: 2025-06-03 Author: Кирило Загоруйко Categories: WAR
The Russian invaders retain capabilities for massive missile strikes on Ukrainian territory, but now these capabilities are somewhat limited. Military expert Mikhail Zhirokhov said this on Radio NV.
In particular, he was asked to what extent the Ukrainian special operation Spider Web to destroy Russian aircraft would affect the ability of Russian aviation to carry out long-range strikes on Ukrainian territory.
"This operation is, first of all, long-term. That is, it will not affect the Russian armed forces right now. It is obvious that the Russians still have a certain number of aircraft. It is only unknown which aircraft. This is very outdated equipment and it has its own resource. To what extent this resource has been knocked out, to what extent have aircraft with less flying time been destroyed. The same Tu-95s have not been produced for at least 30 years," said Zhirokhov.
He noted that there is an open question as to which aircraft were hit by the Ukrainian strike. Because it depends on this whether the Russians will be able to continue using aircraft to strike Ukraine, or will hold them for a possible war with NATO, which they are talking about.
"And I would not say right now that they no longer have the ability to carry out a massive strike. They have such capabilities. But, obviously, they are already limited," Zhirokhov believes.
At the same time, the expert believes that it is absolutely impossible to sum up the results of Operation Spider Web, because all these assessments are of such a rather specific nature.
"Everyone draws their own conclusions, OSINT representatives and military analysts draw conclusions based on incomplete information, far from complete. For example, there are satellite images where they literally look at pixels, and very often this information does not always correspond to reality. Therefore, we can very carefully say that 12-13 aircraft were hit, and how many in reality, we will be able to find out only after a certain time, or never at all," Zhirokhov believes.
According to him, the Russians know that there are satellite images, and in the first hours of the raid they could do everything to hide the real losses.
He admits that the real losses may be greater. There are 12-13 aircraft that can be recorded objectively, and information about the total losses may appear by accident or if there is a leak of information.
