A senior US defense official told reporters on Tuesday that Russia has fired “nearly 670” missiles since the beginning of its invasion of Ukraine.
About half of the missiles fired were fired from Russia, the official said, “the other half largely from inside Ukraine.” “More than 70 missiles have been launched from Belarus, and ‘only six or so’ are coming from the Black Sea,” the official added.
The official added that Putin has “nearly 100 percent” of the combat power he assembled for this invasion into Ukraine, and Putin still “has 95 percent of the combat power he started with.”
“The combat power available to him if you only calculate his estimated losses in terms of aircraft and vehicles that are either inoperable, inoperative or unavailable to him, then he still has a lot of combat power available,” the official said.
The official told reporters that most of Ukraine was covered by “some kind of Russian surface-to-air missile capability”.
“Very little of the Ukrainian nation is not covered by some kind of Russian surface-to-air missile capability, and they also launch offensive air strikes through aircraft-launched missiles as well as from mobile launchers,” the official said.
The official said that while the Russians have greater control over the airspace in some parts of the country, “more in the north than anywhere else,” they do not control the entire country, and public space remains in dispute.
“It’s a highly contested airspace, and as I said before, the Russians have not achieved air superiority over the entire country,” the official said. “But as I also said, there are parts of Ukraine where the Russians have been able to have more control over the airspace, especially you might imagine, in the north than anywhere else, but it’s changing, it’s very dynamic, every day.”
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