This seventh volume in Helion's history of the war in Ukraine covers the air and missile war from March to June 2022. The air war in Ukraine started as somewhat standard warfare utilizing manned aircraft over the battlefield, but it was soon quite apparent that this was not the way to go. Losses on both sides were a bit more than what was expected. The Russians were losing a lot of aircraft to ground based SAMs of various types and Ukraine simply did not have the numbers to fight a war of attrition in the air. It also did not help that they had little in the way of reserve aircraft and the pilot training pipeline is not fast.

As the Russians began to take a ruinous number of casualties, they had to retreat from a number of gains in order to concentrate on the war in the east and the south, places that are still heavily conflicted some three and a half years on. In the air, while Ukraine still made limited use of air assets when attacking the enemy, the Russians changed their tactics so that they wouldn't risk their valuable air assets in an increasingly dangerous environment.

What they did was start to rely more on both air launched and surface launched missiles in an effort to destroy Ukraine's infrastructure. This allowed their aircraft to stay back behind their borders and out of the range of SAM batteries in order to launch air to surface missiles. They also used short and intermediate range ballistic missiles in their attack. Thanks to help from Western nations, Ukraine was able to combat the majority of these strikes, though some did manage to get through. No longer was Russia fighting just Ukraine's army, it was now after the civilian population.

This volume covers the air war for this early stage as it follows the ebb and flow of battle on the ground. During this time, the introduction of drone warfare over the battlefield is also covered as drones were mostly used for reconnaissance, though that would change. Filled with color photos and informative maps and charts, the book is an insightful look at these early months of the conflicts and is a book that I can highly recommend to you.

July 2025

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