Russians' new powerful weapon decided the battle for Avdiivka: It leaves wasteland

In recent weeks, however, everything has changed in the sky above Avdiivka - a former Ukrainian stronghold northwest of occupied Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, Forbes writes.
The Russians dropped precision satellite bombs from 40 kilometers away on Avdiivka, weeks before a dozen Russian brigades and regiments finally forced Ukraine's 110th Mechanized Brigade to withdraw from the devastated city to the west after four months of fierce attacks.
Now that the Russians have finally figured out how to most effectively support ground troops from the air, we can expect the same tactics in other sectors of the 965 kilometer front line.
The strategic aerial bombardment of Avdiivka could "harness a shift in Russian operations elsewhere along the front line," the Institute for War Study said. The Russian Air Force has a thousand fighter-bombers for the first line of defense, about 10 times more fighter jets than the Ukrainian Air Force.
The impressive superiority did not translate into full control of the air over Ukraine when Russian ground forces went on the offensive in February 2022.
"Since the beginning of March 2022, the Russian Air Force has lost the ability to operate in Ukrainian-controlled airspace, except at very low altitudes, due to the inability to reliably suppress or destroy increasingly effective, well-dispersed and mobile Ukrainian surface-to-air missile systems," explained Justin Bronk, Nick Reynolds and Jack Watling in a November 2022 report for the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London.
In the first year of the war, Russian pilots could not risk flights close to the front line. Also, they lacked long-range precision munitions that would have allowed them to support ground forces from a safe distance. Ukrainian...