it means they have either destroyed medium range SAMs or EW can deal with it.
The rest is just tactics. Ka-52/Su-25SM3 may not have range or loiter time to reach certain targets so definitely need other fighters. its not big risk in overall context.
For me, it is simply, I hate seeing flankers getting shot down, and not even by medium and long range SAMs. This pretty much debunks the theory of "Russian advanced jets are getting shot down because the opponent has sophisticated air defense". Well, they are NOT getting shot down by "sophisticated air defense" like medium and long range SAMs.
what is the measurement standard that it is not enough?.
By the standards of Russia's (perceived) peer and opponents: NATO and USA.
Actually Russian will welcome what ever help Europe can give. so that Ukranians know rest of there life thats all they got. it also give operational experience against modern systems.
That's just close-minded stubbornness: "as long as Ukrainians gets it worse than Russians get, it will be a victory". Please, Ukraine is nothing but a small fry. If you think that Russia should waste energy and resources doing attrition warfare with Ukraine, you need to stop. Ukraine was an expendable acid to begin with, as envisioned by the US. Russia not only taking the bait, but also act as if they want to swallow that bait is nothing but false pride and close-minded stubbornness.
This war is bad for Russia. Russia's main strategic task is to win this war with the least amount of resources, time, and energy spent as possible. Doing the opposite just to show “Russia Stronk” is just silliness!
Soviet was too dysfunctional to generate efficiencies in aviation production. they certainly not known for quality and long term service. so i am not sure why you think they following USSR logic when end product may look alike but fundamentally engineered differently.
Soviet industry is distributed. They are also not market oriented. Industries in the West and China are all market oriented. Apart from top secret, high end industries like nuclear, strategic rockets, etc., most Western and Chinese MIC strives to tap in the existing industrial structure of major cities and urban clusters: this is because these existing structures will provide the work force pool, energy, transportation, industrial supporting facilities and infrastructure readily available.
Putting MICs in existing industrial bases is something China has been doing for the last couple of decades. We call it "军民融合". The Soviet MIC industrial layout/distribution is not bad at all, but it was under a different strategic consideration. They plan things out in a very distributed way. One of the main advantage of this is that it could survive large scale major war much better, than putting all you eggs in one basket. And since the USSR is a planned economy, they can do it more efficiently.
However, I think these "Military Industrial Town" concept has many flaws, and it's not suited for today's world. This is because it's essentially opposite of the principle of the "economy of scale". Having a distributed supply chain is essentially the aftermath of economy of scale: instead of having multiple suppliers for the same components, you only let the most competitive ones survive, thus it's essentially "combining the production capacity of the same kind".
But I guess as interconnectivity, 5G, BigData, AI are getting more proliferate, It would not be that big of problem for the future. In the future, it will be more of a "consumption of value", instead of "consumption of volume".
that should be sufficient as there will be more investments into drones and bombers.
Which is something Russia should have started doing quite a few years ago.
There is no Drone fielded yet that has characteristics and flexibility provided by Su-25SM3.
This years of training and moving among airbases was done in South. so there is more success in South. Crimea size land area was captured within few days. there was no this scale of training done in Belarus. so it is highly likely that was diversion tactic.
Depending on how Su-25SM3 is actually doing in this war, it would be nice to see whether A-10 and Su-25SM3 has a future, or whether their time has gone.