A Russian air force Su-34.
Russian state media
Two days after shooting down, in a deadly missile-ambush south of Kherson, three of the Russian air force’s best fighter-bombers, the Ukrainian claimed it shot down a fourth fighter-bomber. This one over occupied Mariupol.
That’s four Sukhoi Su-34s in three days, a weekly rate of loss that’s one of the worst so far for the Russian air force, 22 months into Russia’s wider war on Ukraine.
And it just might get even worse for the Russians. The Ukrainian air force is about to get a significant upgrade, in the form of ex-Dutch Lockheed Martin F-16 fighters.
The Ukrainian air force swatted those three Su-34s around noon on Friday just south of the Dnipro River in southern Kherson Oblast. The Sukhois reportedly were flying at high altitude, lining up to lob satellite-guided glide-bombs at the Ukrainian bridgehead in Krynky, on the otherwise Russian-held left bank of the Dnipro.
It’s unclear how the Ukrainians shot down those three twin-engine, two-seat Sukhois on Friday, reportedly killing most of the aviators aboard. But it’s worth noting that Germany recently had delivered a Patriot air-defense missile battery, Ukraine’s third.
A Patriot PAC-2 missile ranges as far as a hundred miles under the best circumstances, making it Ukraine’s farthest-traveling air-defense missile. A Patriot battery situated well behind the front line in Kherson easily can hit a Russian glide-bomber at its farthest release point, 25 miles or so from a target along the Dnipro.
The three confirmed recent Su-34 shoot-downs—four if you count Sunday’s claimed shoot-down—bring to 25 or 26 the number of the fighter-bombers the Russians have lost over Ukraine, out of a total pre-war fleet of probably fewer than 150 aircraft.
The Su-34 is the Russian air force’s best fighter-bomber, and the only type in the Russian inventory that has the combination of sensors, avionics and smart weaponry that allows it to detect and attack pop-up targets on short notice.
The Russian air force “is almost certainly anxious to minimize further losses of these expensive and complex aircraft,” Justin Bronk, Nick Reynolds and Jack Watling noted in a November 2022 study for the Royal United Services Institute in London.
At the time RUSI published the study, the Russians had lost just 17 Su-34s. Now that they’ve lost as many as 26 of the $50-million jets—nearly a fifth of the fleet—the Russians’ anxiety undoubtedly is much worse.
It’s not for no reason that, after the Ukrainians swatted three Sukhois on Friday, the Russian air force reportedly halted—at least temporarily—glide-bombing raids on Ukraine’s Dnipro bridgehead.
Novosibirsk-based plane-maker Chkalov Aviation Plant annually produces just a handful of new Su-34s. Moscow cannot sustain the current rate of loss, to say nothing of sustaining a potentially higher rate of loss once Ukraine’s new F-16s join the fight in the coming weeks.
