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Akbar Novruz

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Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski has claimed that NATO could rapidly overwhelm Russia in the event of an attack, arguing that the alliance has a decisive advantage in air power even without the United States.

Speaking in what appeared to be a candid setting, Sikorski pointed to the scale of NATO’s air capabilities and compared them with Ukraine’s campaign against Russian energy infrastructure.

He said NATO has around 2,500 aircraft and argued that the alliance would retain overwhelming air superiority over Russia even without US forces.

“If Russia attacked us and we took our gloves off, I think we would defeat Russia quite quickly. We have overwhelming superiority over Russia in air power. General, correct me if I'm wrong, but it's something like 2,500 planes.

Without the US, it's still overwhelming. And I haven't checked recently how many JDAMs and JASMs and all the deep strike stuff that we have. But if the Ukrainians have knocked out half of Russia's refining capacity in six months, we could do it in six weeks and take out the other half.”

Sikorski’s comparison refers to Ukrainian strikes on Russia’s oil-refining infrastructure, which have targeted facilities deep inside Russian territory and disrupted parts of the country’s fuel-processing capacity.

His remarks highlight the disparity he sees between Ukraine’s ability to strike Russian energy infrastructure with relatively limited resources and the potential capabilities of NATO’s combined air forces and long-range precision weapons.

The Polish foreign minister did not provide a detailed assessment of Russia’s current air fleet or NATO’s operational capacity, and his six-week estimate appeared to be a hypothetical comparison rather than a formal military assessment.