One of the most surprising aspects of the war in Ukraine is Russia’s failure to destroy Ukrainian air defense systems it built, one of the top American generals in Europe says, according to Insider.

“As for the Russian Air Force, I think almost everyone thought they could take out Ukrainian air defense systems at the beginning of the war,” said Gen. James Hecker, commander of U.S. Air Force Europe. , at an event organized at the end of last week.

“They didn’t succeed. I know it’s a difficult task to do because it’s the same for us, but they (the Russians) seem to have given up on it pretty early on,” he added.

The failure of the Russian Air Force (which Moscow officially calls Aerocosmsky) to gain air superiority over Ukraine is seen by analysts as one of the most important factors in the failure of Vladimir Putin’s invasion to achieve its goals in the first weeks of the war. war

While military analysts have offered several possible explanations for the failure, General Hecker says it somewhat surprised U.S. military leaders, especially given that the air defense systems Ukraine had at the start of the war were overwhelmingly Soviet. -made systems that were also at the disposal of Russian engineering and the armed forces.

It seems that the US military believes that the Russian military does not know its own weapons systems well

“I would say I was a little surprised. I know how difficult it is to disable these systems, but I thought that since the Russians built these systems, they would have ideas and a better way to figure out how to bypass these systems,” the commander of the US Air Force in Europe also said.

Similar comments were made last summer by US Air Force Chief of Staff General Charles Brown Jr., who said in June 2022 that he was surprised by the failures of Russian military aircraft in Ukraine, because “the systems with facings are their own systems” and that the Russians “should know them relatively well and know how to defeat them.”

“It raises a real question mark for me: How could they not understand their own systems and how could they defeat their own systems?” Brown added.

Since then, President Joe Biden has nominated General Brown for the post of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but the proposal was blocked by the opposition of Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville of Arizona, whose boycott left 3 branches of the US armed forces. without a commander and interfered with hundreds of other military assignments.

Despite the fact that Ukraine has since received Patriot and other Western air defense systems, the majority of such equipment in service with its armed forces is Soviet-made.

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