Iron-clad protection of Ukrainian homes and businesses against future Russian bomber, missile and kamikaze drone strikes will be politically possible for the West to provide, and will likely become a major stumbling block to US President-elect Donald Trump’s bid to end the Russia-Ukraine War in a matter of days, regional security experts told Kyiv Post in interviews.
The Kremlin after invading Ukraine unleashed the most punishing sustained aerial bombardment of a nation, by any country, since the Vietnam War. According to end-of-September Ukrainian government counts, since July 24 Russian forces had launched 9,627 missiles of all types and 13,997 kamikaze drones at targets across Ukraine.
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From October this year through to the present, Russian combat aircraft launched an additional 100-150 air strikes, daily, to hit front line positions and the rear area, Ukrainian army counts say.
Kremlin spokespersons have said that Russia only hits military targets, but either by intent or accident, the reality is different. On July 9, a Russian cruise missile ploughed into a children’s hospital in central Kyiv, killing at least two people and injuring 30 women and children and injuring more than 150. The deadliest Russian strike of 2024 hit a graduation ceremony at a military institute in the northern city of Poltava, killing 50 and injuring 271. Almost all victims were civilians.
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Ukraine’s miniscule air force and thinly-spread air defenses have struggled to intercept the arsenal of Russian flying munitions – ranging from high-tech semi-hypersonic missiles, ballistic missiles and newly-developed glider bombs weighting as much as three tons, to imported Iranian kamikaze drones and North Korean missiles – violating Ukrainian airspace daily.
Ukrainian Air Force statistics for November 2024 record that, in a typical day of Russian strikes, Ukrainian defenses usually manage to intercept about 70-80 percent of the drones, between one-quarter and half of the missiles, almost none of the ballistic missiles and none of the glider bombs.
An October UN estimate said that its researchers had confirmed 11,973 Ukrainian civilians killed in the war, almost all by Russian bombardment. Ukrainian officials and independent media usually put the actual figure twice that or more. A February UN estimate put the cost of reconstruction and recovery war damage in Ukraine, both from air bombardment and ground combat, at $486 billion.
Key officials in the newly elected Trump-led administration have said that stopping the war, and in part Russia’s relentless military bombardment of civilian Ukraine, will be a top priority when they take power in January 2025.
“The president has made it clear that he wants to bring both sides to the negotiating table. He is focused on ending the war, not continuing it,” Trump’s nominated National Security Head Mike Waltz told Voice of America in a Nov. 14 interview.
A key challenge for Waltz and the incoming White House foreign policy team will be finding a way to accommodate, or maybe just steamroll, the Kyiv position that a ceasefire would directly threaten Ukrainian national security, unless Ukraine had absolute guarantees against future Russian attacks.
The view that the Kremlin cannot be trusted and that only military hardware on the ground in Ukraine, or hard military support commitments by powerful allies, or both, could deter Russia from attacking again is almost universal in Ukraine, and increasingly supported in European capitals
One key piece of any peaceful Ukrainian future – credible and effective protection of Ukrainian homes and businesses from future Russian air, missile, and kamikaze drone strikes – would be a technical stretch for all of NATO even were the US were on board with it, which America isn’t, regional security specialists agreed.
“NATO has standing plans for no-fly zones over Ukraine, they could execute it were there a decision,” Alp Sevimlisoy, a Turkish-based geopolitical and markets risk researcher, told Kyiv Post in a November interview. “But there has to be in synchronicity with the United States. American support for it to be decisive.”
Sevimlisoy and other regional security experts said that, were either NATO as an organization or a group of NATO nations willing to commit to protection of Ukrainian air space, and America were not to participate, then the protection to Ukrainian air space would be somewhere between not particularly effective, to symbolic.
Major European air forces might just be able to deploy dozens of aircraft and sufficient support personnel to patrol airspace between Ukrainian and Russian forces were there to be a ceasefire, but even were the aircraft and crew to be found in Europe, NATO bases in Germany, Turkey and Romania would be critical for any multi-national attempt to protect Ukrainian air space, they said.
Professor Gustav Meibauer, a Nijmegen political science researcher in a November interview with Kyiv Post pointed to the complexity of protecting Ukrainian air space from future Russian attack, even if all the physical means were available.
“Legally, this is not a problem for international law. Ukraine has called for help,” Meibaur said. “The problem is rules of engagement.”
Author of the book No-Fly Zone Effectiveness: From Military-Strategic Tool to Political Shorthand, Meibaur said that past coalition-operated no fly zones in Syria, Bosnia and Iraq were a scale of magnitude smaller than the level of air protection Ukraine would need, to be secure from more Russian air strikes.
Russia’s battered but still powerful air force, and numerous air defense systems would make any international attempt to make Ukraine’s skies safe from current or future Russian air attacks a giant air-policing effort on a scale the Atlantic Alliance has never come close to attempting before, against a near-peer adversary NATO has never faced in a shooting conflict before, analysts said.
“In the past, if the adversary has anti-air capabilities, they would need to be suppressed. In 2007, the first thing was to hit the air defenses, in order to de-risk the no-fly zone. In Ukraine they would have to consider that. You don’t want NATO jets flying over Ukraine and being shot at from Russia-controlled territory or Russia. How do you get rid of that risk?” Meibaur said.
Lt. Gen. (ret.) Virgil Bălăceanu, former senior Romanian officer at the NATO headquarters in Brussels, told Kyiv Post “The likelihood of NATO declaring a no-fly zone outside of NATO airspace, specifically beyond the airspace of front-line states on NATO’s eastern border, is nearly impossible. Why? Because NATO decisions are made only by consensus, and there will likely be at least one NATO member state opposing such a declaration.”
Opinions varied on Ukraine’s (or Waltz’s negotiating team’s) chances of lining up an individual European state to commit warplanes and personnel to protection of Ukrainian air space, as part of a Russo-Ukrainian ceasefire deal.
“Some countries could see participation in a multi-lateral (air) operation in Ukraine as a way to advance their own national security objectives,” Sevimlisoy said. “Turkey is a Black Sea superpower…but it would have to be as part of a coalition.”
“In this situation, we would already be talking about national decisions—difficult to achieve but not impossible. Clearly, this would involve decisions at the level of front-line states, using their own means to secure the area or potentially including those of some partners,” Bălăceanu said.
Meibaur said: “This is politics. It’s not facts-based specific types of strategy, vibes. That goes all the way up to key decision makers. Some are good at looking at interests. But [German Chancellor Olaf] Scholtz really seems to struggle with the real geo-political needs of Ukraine. These decisions are guts-based. How will my voters react?”
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