On Dec. 22, the commander of Ukraine’s air force, Mykola Oleshchuk, announced the country had downed three more Russian Su-34 fighter bombers—all in the same day. According to the open-source intelligence site Oryx, the total of this type shot down since the February 2022 invasion is now at least 21 (not including losses due to training accidents, malfunctions, and friendly fire).
An assessment published only one month after the invasion reads: "Su-34s are falling from the sky in numbers that must be startling for air force commanders. Their newest planes are suffering the same fate as their oldest."
Only about 145 Su-34 aircraft were still operational at the beginning of the invasion with 20 percent of that prewar inventory now lost in action. For the Russian Air Force, this is a significant reduction in combat potential, not to mention a financial setback.
The Su-34 is Russia’s most sophisticated tactical combat platform, designed to take out an opponent’s strategic assets at extended ranges. According to Ukrainian military officials it is also the Russia’s most expensive aircraft at more than $50 million per copy.
Replacing downed Su-34s is not an option. Moscow has only a sole, limited capacity production line at the Novosibirsk Aviation Production Association. This fact, plus the high price tag of this model due to its complicated set of on-board electronics, restricts the number that can be built per year to single digits.
Some of the airpower deficiencies can be blamed on the service’s shortcomings. Other factors include sanctions blocking the purchase of high-technology, military-capable electronic components from abroad.
But blame for Russia’s unsuccessful air-land battle plan falls largely on the air force’s inability to perform its most basic and essential missions—functions it must perform in any major military conflict. If it fails to do so, the much-vaunted blitzkrieg-style Russian combined-arms juggernaut that the West was told for decades would roll over NATO in a matter of days grinds to a halt. Or, as in the case of the invasion of Ukraine, never materializes to begin with.
During the Soviet era and increasingly in post-Communist Russia, Moscow’s military planners stressed the importance of airpower in any European theater force-on-force conflict. Even though many of Russia’s aircraft designs date back to the 1980s, their avionics were modernized from the late 1990s forward, allowing an expansion of their role within the military.
This template for the current-day operational plan was demonstrated in Syria. After-action assessments of that campaign conclude "Russian airpower played a decisive role in reversing the fortunes of the Syrian regime" and saved Moscow’s long-serving client from being overrun.
So how and why, given this post-Soviet operational history, has Russian airpower made such a poor showing in Ukraine to date?
Western military experts familiar with the Ukraine campaign provided several insights into causes of those failures. What becomes clear is these shortcomings are not just bad planning or accidental occurrences, but longer-term, deeper deficiencies within the Russian military that will turn into permanent disadvantages vis-à-vis the United States and its NATO allies.
The first of these were evident from the beginning of the war. A few months after the invasion, former U.S. European Command head Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges explained at the Warsaw Security Forum how the Russian military could have carried out rapid-reaction operations in Georgia in 2008, the occupation of Crimea in 2014, and the Syria intervention that began in 2015—but then subsequently performed so dismally in Ukraine.
"Those previous operations succeeded because they were limited in size and operational complexity—it was always the same ‘sliver’ of personnel within the Russian military," Hodges said. These quick-strike ops against a limited number of objectives could be achieved with a few elite units that did not require extensive logistical support. "But when you try to scale up these operations and the size of the force by several orders of magnitude—over large swaths of territory—the deficiencies that exist across their services become exposed and amplified."
At the same forum, another European theater flag officer, former Supreme Allied Commander of Europe, Gen. Philip Breedlove, detailed how these organizational and training shortfalls and a lack of a functional command structure have hobbled the entire Russian air campaign.
For years "we had assumed Russia still had the skill to perform the [suppression of enemy air defenses] mission: to locate, track and neutralize these surface-to-air missile installations," he said. "This is a skill set that air forces, particularly the USAF, practice every day. If the Russians ever had this capability, they have forgotten about how to do this."
The consequence is "the Russians are now in an operational environment they are not used to nor capable at performing. This requires them to fly low, which is something that we—but not they—practiced in the Cold War era. The USAF thinking was we would have to fly low to avoid Russian SAMs. This is a skill that is hard enough to train for in peacetime, but for the Russians to now try and switch and do this in the middle of wartime is almost impossible."
The Russian Air Force’s need to "fly low" to avoid air defenses has led to serial losses of the Su-34 and other modern Russian fighters—shot down by short-range, low-altitude missiles like the U.S.-made Stinger. The electronic warfare systems on board these platforms are designed to spoof longer-range air defense systems like the Patriot battery but offer minimal protection against these low-altitude, hand-held threats.
Complicating matters further, said Breedlove: "Russian Air Force pilots’ flying time [per month] is also very low. This has made them incapable of carrying out other missions that Western air forces consider to be critically important."
What has made operational conditions worse for the Russians in the past year has been the donations to Ukraine of Western-designed air defense systems: the Norwegian-U.S. NASAMS, Germany’s IRIS-T GL, and the U.S.-made Patriot. Despite initial predictions by the United States and others that these systems were "too complex" for the Ukrainians to master, "they have come up to speed rapidly," said Breedlove, Hodges, and others.
This has proved to be problematic for Russian tactical aircraft, which are now being shot down at extended ranges. The downing of the three Su-34s on December 22 was accomplished "by use of one of the Western-made anti-air systems," said one senior Ukraine defense official who spoke to the Washington Free Beacon. Due to operational restrictions he declined to specify which foreign-made missile system downed these aircraft.
Part of the Russians’ problem is that they "continue to believe that they are somehow invulnerable when they are operating aircraft either over their own territory or areas of Ukraine they occupied initially in 2014, such as Crimea," he continued. "They have some very powerful jamming pods installed on the Su-34s, but the question is are they using them when they should be—as in do they turn them on when required? Do the pods work properly? Are they aware of the actual ranges of some of these Western air defence complexes?"
The Russian military, as one U.K. Ministry of Defense specialist pointed out earlier in 2023, "is not a learning organism. Mistakes tend to be repeated over and over until some corrective action is taken in operational practices—if ever."
How this applies to Russia’s use of airpower was discussed in a Daily Telegraph roundtable podcast last April. Russia’s air force does have an impressive array of modern aircraft, said a participant, "but they essentially only carry out attacks in onesies and twosies, and they cannot coordinate more than that." This inefficient, under-use of airpower is due in large part to Moscow’s lack of airborne battle management assets, like the famous Boeing E-3 AWACS, and the ability to share air data intelligence in real time with air crews.
The Russian Air Force may be generating large numbers of sorties, "but they are just launching out, doing something, and coming back in a series of one-off missions," he explained. "There is also a reticence by the Russian Air Force to actually get up [into the airspace] over Ukraine and fight because they know their chances of being shot down are very high, especially now that the Patriots are there. I do not know what the exact operating orders for these Patriot crews are going to be, but with a 150-kilometer range, Russian aeroplanes can now be taken out quite far away."
These trends make it hard to see how the Russians will ever be able to rebuild, given the rates at which it is losing aircraft to combat—plus attrition due to exceeding service lifespan limitations. In 2024, with the imminent introduction of Western fighter aircraft now being delivered to Ukraine’s air forces, what remains of Russia’s ability to operate with confidence near Ukraine airspace may be coming to an end.
Reuben F. Johnson is a defense technology consultant and a correspondent for the U.S. publication Breaking Defense.