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Polish Foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorksi said a victory against Vladimir Putin’s forces would be swift due to the “overwhelming superiority” of its air forces, even without support from the United States.
“If Russia attacked us and we took our gloves off, I think we would defeat Russia quite quickly. We have overwhelming superiority over Russia in air power. General, correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s something like 2,500 aircraft,” he said during a discussion at the Yalta European Strategy meeting in Kyiv on Saturday.
“Even without the US it’s still overwhelming, and I haven’t checked recently how many F-35s and JASSMs and all the deep-strike capabilities we have.”
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He went further to say that Poland could knock out half of Russia’s refining capacity in a matter of weeks. The comments were in relation to a potential conflict between Russia and Nato and not about the prospect of a direct war between Russia and Poland.
“But if the Ukrainians have knocked out half of Russia’s refining capacity in six months, we could do it in six weeks and take out the other half,” he continued.
Russian foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova accused Sikorski of “Russophobia of the brain” in discussing the conflict.
Speculation has abounded that Moscow is plotting to attack Nato, claims that the country has denied.
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Last month CIA director John Ratcliffe made a short trip to Moscow - the last time that a CIA chief visited the country personally was in the weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Several sources familiar with the discussions told CBS News that Ratcliffe had made the visit to warn Russia against an attack on Nato.
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To be fair, any air superiority scenario is always about some kind of specific geographic area, and Russia is big enough that there are likely to be targets beyond the range of the fighters that enforce air supremacy
Also there is a third country which operates strategic bombers: Russia. It has been using them against Ukraine, and Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb (the raid with trucks full of drones) was specifically an effort to take out a big chunk of that strategic bomber fleet
All correct. The sheer size works both in favor and against Russia. It’s harder to gain air superiority, but it’s also harder to cover everything with defense.
(I totally blocked out the Tupolev bombers in my mind, unintentionally.)