Isnt their performance to do with their doctrine.
The word 'performance' implies a measurement against a standard. In this case, it is more Russia's military against its own standards and less against others'. That said, if you have certain war and combat doctrines, you should have training and equipment to perform against your doctrines. It is now six months and Russia is effectively stalled against/by a combatant force that under all paper specs, Russia should have created its own version of Desert Storm.
Unlike NATOs doctrine, isnt theirs mostly to do with denying the enemy air force the ability to use their air force against their ground troops.
Unlike? What do you think is US/NATO war doctrine? That was a rhetorical question.
Am US Air Force, and Time magazine has an article that meshes well with your question and this current Russia-Ukraine war, at least on the airpower side. I suggest you read the article slowly and carefully, as well as my responses to specific sections from that article.
The program shows how Ukrainians are using invention, social media and disregard for protocol against Russia.
time.com
Alexander Gorgan was lying in a three-foot-deep trench dug to defend a snow-covered village north of Kyiv in March, and Russian artillery shells were shattering the frozen ground on all sides. He could hear a platoon commander in a foxhole nearby shouting into the radio: “Can you strike back? Can you hit them? Can you cover us? Please give us cover. We need support. Cover us!” But there was nothing to hit back with.
Gorgan believes in God but at that moment, he wasn’t convinced God was going to save his life. “In that situation, there really has to be something tangible that can help you, and I thought about the A-10,” Gorgan told TIME. “I would be really lucky to hear the noise from his cannon.”
At the highest level, the nth goal of airpower is to support ground forces because still, to win is to control the ground. Gorgan heard the desperate cry for support of any kind, but most desiring -- of airpower. It is not spoken over the radio but ask any soldier who have been in combat, attacks from the third dimension is the most terrifying or the most encouraging. US war doctrines have it that US ground forces will not be under enemy airpower and that has been so since the end of the Korean War. In Desert Storm, we secured Iraqi airspace before general Norman Schwarzkopf gave the order for allied ground forces to move.
...while the A-10 is well-designed to attack tanks, it is vulnerable in contested airspace like that over Ukraine, where Russian jets and anti-aircraft missiles remain active.
My comments are not about the A-10 but the A-10 is the ideal symbol for what we are discussing.
Criticisms on the A-10, especially its vulnerability in contested airspace as how Ukraine is, seems to reasonable but is ultimately misguided. The A-10 is one instrument among many in US war doctrines regarding the use of airpower, which is to deny the enemy airspace and to send a unique tool to attack enemy ground forces. That unique tool is the A-10. We have other platforms to render contested airspaces -- ours. The F-15 and F-16 are designed primarily for air-air. The A-10 is designed primarily for air-ground, specifically, air-ground that are close to ground troops or 'close air support' (CAS). We do not want the A-10 to worry about enemy air superiority fighters. We want our ground troops to fight in 3D as enemy ground troops fight in 2D. Which do
YOU think have greater odds of victory? Not theirs.
But why do we have such clear platform mission distinctions?
BECAUSE WE CAN AFFORD IT. Not only that, once we designed and built platforms to suit our doctrines, we trained our forces to exploit those advantages.
BECAUSE WE CAN AFFORD IT.
“The Ukrainians have surprised us, surprised everyone, with how innovative they can be,” says former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Bill Taylor, who has known Gorgan for more than 15 years.
The 'everyone' here includes the Russians. Make no mistake about that. But willpower and innovation can only go so far. No matter how much individual US airmen helped the Ukrainians, without the actual hardware, the Ukrainians will lose. Except they did not. Instead, absent US hardware, the Ukrainians managed to take advantage of Russian military shortcomings, incompetence, corruption, poor training, and even inept leadership to stall the Russian military. What does that say about the Russian military in general? Not good no matter what its war doctrines.
One of the instructors introduced himself and offered a tour, asking that his name not appear in print. Russian President
Vladimir Putin “only understands force,” he says. “So give us the instruments, and we will deal with him.”
The A-10 Thunderbolt would be a decisive instrument, he says. If the U.S. provides it to Ukraine, “you will see the difference in the number of targets we’d be able to hit. You’d see that in the weakening of their offensive positions. And you’d see that in the confidence of our infantry in moving from defense to offense.”
The confidence, or possibly overconfidence, is amazing. Nevertheless, we are not looking at one person's perspective but that of many US airmen, specifically A-10 pilots, active duty and retired, who are covertly training the Ukrainian pilots, and many of them came from Desert Storm. Despite the fact that the A-10 was designed primarily for air-ground, the confidence here is that the Ukrainian airspace is sufficiently contested that the A-10, under Ukrainian command, can change the course of the war. What does that say about the Russian Air Force? Not good.
“They are more valuable than generals,” Gorgan says. Even before the Russian invasion, the identities of active fighter pilots were a closely guarded secret in Ukraine, and all of them lived with the risk of assassination.
Back in Desert Storm, general Norman Schwarzkopf gave his air component commander general Charles Horner practically
carte blanche permission to do whatever necessary to ensure allied ground troops will not face the Iraqi Air Force. Horner delivered in ways that will reflect in military academies all over the world and for decades to come. The VKS failed miserably over Ukraine.
When U.S. Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall was asked in late July if the U.S. would consider giving Ukraine A-10s, he didn’t rule it out in the long term. “Older U.S. systems are a possibility,” Kendall said, speaking at the Aspen Security Forum.
You can use the forum's search feature and read my comment about the Russian use of the VKS as little more than 'airborne artillery' (keywords). The A-10 was designed as such. The jet is not technically sophisticated like the F-15 and F-16, and leave alone the F-22 and F-35. When I was active duty, I sat in the cockpit of an A-10 from Spangdahlem and I jokingly said I could have fly the A-10 after my time in the Cessna 152. The A-10 was designed as an 'airborne artillery' platform. But in Ukraine, the VKS is flying all of its fighters as 'airborne artillery'. So either the VKS have limited war doctrines regarding airpower or it is logistically so poor that it cannot afford to drop bombs past the ground troops front lines. Either way, this enabled the Ukrainians to stall the Russian Army advances.
“As for the American pilots and instructors, they were extremely cautious in the ways they helped us, because they are prohibited from having any direct contact with foreign military personnel,” Gorgan said. “They made clear that they could not and would not pass along any classified information.”
If US/NATO air forces are in this war, the Russian Army would be decimated.
I have no problems speaking objectively that by all paper measures, the VKS should have taken all of Ukrainian sky by the second week. But after two months, in my opinion, the VKS is a shiddy air force.