The Ukrainian air force said the Russian air force lost three Su-34 fighter-bombers on Thursday. If this is confirmed, the planes shot down on the last day of February will continue an unprecedented series of successes for Ukrainian air defense.
The Ukrainians claim that in the second half of February they shot down 13 Russian aircraft: seven Su-34s, two Su-35 fighters and A-50 radar aircraft (the second one in several months).
But these reported losses are even worse than they appear for Russia's increasingly stressed air force. In theory, the air force has many more aircraft. In practice, they are dangerously close to collapse.
How exactly the Ukrainians manage to shoot down so many planes is unclear. It is possible that the Ukrainian Air Force has transferred some of its US-made Patriot missile launchers to mobile air defense teams that quickly move close to the 600-mile front line, ambush Russian aircraft, fire them with PAK-2 missiles with a range of 90 miles, and then quickly redeploy to avoid a counterattack.
But the distance from which the Ukrainians shot down the A-50 a week ago—120 miles or so—hints that a longer-range missile system was involved. It may have been a vintage Cold War-era S-200 that the Ukrainian Air Force pulled out of long-term storage.
It is also clear that the Ukrainians have moved some of their two dozen 25-mile Nasams MANPADS missile batteries closer to the front line. After all, the Russians found—and destroyed with a missile—a Nasams launcher near the southern city of Zaporozhye for the first time on Monday or earlier.
It is possible that the Russian troops’ own actions led to a sharp increase in aviation losses. After Russian troops finally crushed, at incredible cost in life and equipment, the ammunition-starved Ukrainian garrison in the ruins of Avdiivka in eastern Ukraine two weeks ago, the Russian army in Ukraine is advancing on other Ukrainian garrisons that are also running low on ammunition - all thanks to Republicans in the US Congress, who have been blocking further aid to Ukraine from the United States since October.
Sensing an opportunity, the Russian air force is flying more sorties closer to the front lines, dropping guided bombs to suppress Ukrainian forces. “The enemy has overcome the fear of using aircraft directly over the battlefield,” explains the Ukrainian Center for Defense Strategies, “and although this leads to the loss of aircraft, its ground forces gain a significant advantage in firepower.”
The increase in Russian sorties creates more targets for Ukrainian air defense forces. So of course they shoot down more Russian planes.
The Ukrainian effort is helped by the fact that Russian pilots increasingly fail to notice Ukrainian missile launches. The Russian air force once relied on its nine active A-50 radar aircraft, organized into three three-aircraft "orbits" in the south, east and north, to expand radar coverage throughout Ukraine.
By damaging one A-50 in a drone strike last year and shooting down two more A-50s this year, the Ukrainians have eliminated a third of radar coverage and created blind spots that make it difficult for Russian pilots to spot incoming missiles.
In any case, the consequences of the recent Ukrainian hits are dire for the Russians. The Russian air force is losing combat aircraft at a much faster rate than it can afford. Russia's sanctioned aerospace industry is struggling to build more than a few dozen new planes a year.
Increasingly large losses, amplified by contracted aircraft production, will almost certainly increase stress on surviving aircraft and crews. The Russian Air Force is not yet in an organizational death spiral. But they are getting closer to her.
The numbers speak for themselves. On paper, the Russian air force has 140 twin-engine, two-seat, supersonic Su-34s. Given this year's unconfirmed losses, the air force has already lost 31 Su-34 aircraft.
But 109 Su-34s is still a lot, isn’t it?
According to Michael Bohnert, an engineer at the California-based RAND Corporation, this is not the case. Shot down planes represent "only a portion of the total losses" of Russian fighters, Bohnert wrote back in August: "Overuse of these aircraft also costs Russia dearly as the war drags on."
“In a protracted war, where one force is trying to exhaust another, the overall endurance of the military force is important,” Bohnert added. “And this is precisely the state of diminishing endurance that the VKS, the Russian air force, now finds itself in.”
Bohnert suggested that the air force entered the war two years ago with about 900 fighters and attack aircraft and lost about 100 of them to Ukrainian actions in the first 18 months of fighting. The problem for the Russians, besides the losses, is that the need for fighter and attack aircraft missions has not decreased, even though the number of fighters and attack aircraft has decreased.
So the 800 planes that remain are flying more frequently to carry out tasks that the Kremlin once assigned to 900 planes. That means more wear and tear, more maintenance requirements and a growing hunger for increasingly hard-to-find spare parts—a necessity that is effectively taking aircraft out of service with the military.
“The extra hours that the Air Force has kept aircraft in the air since February 2022 has actually cost the [Air Force] an additional 27 to 57 aircraft lost,” Bohnert estimated. And that was before Russian aircraft losses rose sharply in December and the number of Russian sorties also increased sharply as the Battle of Avdiivka reached its climax.
In other words, the likely losses are likely even higher. Combined with recently shot down aircraft, they could mean the Russian air force is down to 700 airworthy fighters and attack aircraft. Two hundred less than two years ago.
To avoid more wear and tear and more losses from downed aircraft, the Russian air force may soon face a difficult choice: fly less frequently or risk a decline in combat readiness.
All this means that if Bohnert is right, the Russian air campaign in Ukraine is not viable. And it becomes even less stable with each additional plane shot down by the Ukrainians.
