Russia's Air Power Is Facing a Serious Problem: The Full Story of How Four Years of War, Drone Strikes Deep Inside Russia, Irreplaceable Losses, and Western Sanctions Are Hollowing Out the World's Second-Largest Air Force
Introduction
On paper, Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 with one of the most formidable tactical air arms on the planet. The Russian Aerospace Forces — the VKS — were assessed at approximately 1,300 to 1,400 combat aircraft, including some of the most capable fourth and fourth-plus generation fighters available outside the United States and China: Su-35S air superiority fighters with supermanoeuvre capability, Su-34 strike aircraft designed for deep interdiction missions, Su-30SM multirole jets with exceptional range and payload, and the Su-57 fifth-generation stealth fighter that Russia had spent three decades and enormous treasury on developing. The VKS also maintained a significant strategic aviation component — long-range bombers including the Tu-95 Bear, the Tu-160 Blackjack, and the Tu-22M3 Backfire — that gave Russia the ability to strike at long range with conventional and nuclear-capable weapons. It was, in every meaningful assessment, one of the two or three most capable air forces in the world.
Four years and four months later, that picture looks very different. Open-source intelligence trackers have confirmed more than 353 Russian aircraft destroyed across the conflict — and those are only the losses with photographic or videographic proof, meaning actual losses are certainly higher. The aircraft include frontline fighters, long-range bombers, helicopters, transport aircraft, and high-value enablers whose loss carries consequences far beyond the individual airframe. The Russian Air Force has lost at least two A-50 Mainstay airborne early warning and control aircraft — complex, irreplaceable platforms whose destruction has materially degraded Russia's ability to coordinate air operations. It has lost approximately 20 per cent of its operational strategic bomber fleet in assets that take decades to build and cannot be replaced from any existing production line. It has lost dozens of Su-25 ground-attack aircraft whose production line has been shut down, meaning every Su-25 lost is a permanent reduction in Russia's close air support capability that cannot be offset by new manufacturing. And it has faced, since January 2026 alone, a Ukrainian intelligence operation that destroyed an estimated $1 billion in Russian aircraft, munitions, and fuel depots across five air bases in a single night.
The accumulating picture is of an air force that entered the war expecting to dominate the skies in days and is now, in its fifth year of conflict, facing a fundamentally different strategic reality: a rate of attrition that consistently outpaces its rate of replacement, a maintenance burden that compounds every combat loss with additional imputed losses from overuse of ageing airframes, and a set of irreplaceable platform losses that are quietly restructuring the ceiling of what Russian air power can accomplish not only in Ukraine but globally for years to come.
The Starting Point: What Russia Had and How It Expected to Use It
Russia's pre-war air power advantage over Ukraine was not marginal. It was overwhelming. Ukraine entered 2022 with roughly 120 to 130 operational fighters and ground-attack jets — a small, ageing fleet of Soviet-era platforms that had already suffered aviation losses during Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea and the subsequent fighting in the Donbas. Russia's 1,300 to 1,400 combat aircraft represented a starting advantage of roughly ten to one. In any conventional military calculus, that disparity should have been decisive: air superiority established quickly, Ukrainian air defences suppressed or destroyed, and Russian ground forces operating under an umbrella of Russian air cover that would have been effectively impossible to challenge.
It did not work out that way. Ukraine's air force, despite its numerical inferiority, did not collapse in the opening days of the war. Ukrainian pilots dispersed their aircraft aggressively, denying Russian forces the concentrated destruction at airfields that would have eliminated the Ukrainian Air Force as a fighting entity. Ukraine's ground-based air defence network — Soviet-era systems initially, supplemented progressively by Western-supplied Patriot batteries, NASAMS, IRIS-T, and other modern systems — proved more resilient, more capable, and more lethal to Russian aircraft than Moscow had anticipated. And Russia's own air force made operational choices that, with the benefit of hindsight, appear to have reflected an assumption that the war would be short: flying missions that exposed expensive aircraft to Ukrainian air defences at altitudes and in manoeuvres that prioritised speed of air campaign execution over preservation of irreplaceable assets.
The consequence is that four years into a war expected to last days, Russia's air force has been engaged in a sustained attrition contest it was not designed for — and from which it is emerging structurally weakened in ways that will outlast any ceasefire or peace settlement that eventually follows.
The Numbers: What Has Actually Been Lost
The open-source intelligence organisation Oryx, which compiles verified aircraft losses supported by photographic or videographic evidence, provides the most methodologically rigorous publicly available count of Russian air power losses in Ukraine. As of mid-2026, Oryx's confirmed Russian losses include:
20 Su-30SMs — advanced multirole fighters that form a significant component of Russia's air superiority capability. 42 Su-34s — the strike aircraft designed for deep interdiction that Russia has used extensively for glide bomb deliveries against Ukrainian targets. Eight Su-35Ss — Russia's most capable air superiority fighter, whose loss at any scale is strategically significant given the aircraft's role in maintaining air superiority. One Su-57 — Russia's only operational fifth-generation stealth fighter, destroyed in a Ukrainian drone strike, with the aircraft's apparent reluctance to fly combat missions in Ukraine now revealed as far from irrational given the risk it faces from Ukrainian air defences. Five MiG-31s — interceptors whose role in Russian air doctrine extends to hypersonic missile carriage and high-altitude air defence. 41 Su-25 ground-attack aircraft — a critical close air support platform whose production line no longer exists.
15 Su-24s. Three Su-27s. At least 11 Tu-22M3 Backfire bombers — representing a devastating proportion of Russia's medium-range strike aviation and a platform that takes years to overhaul and cannot currently be replaced from new production. Ten Tu-95MS strategic bombers — representing approximately 20 per cent of Russia's operational heavy strategic bomber fleet, which cannot be rebuilt at any meaningful pace. Two A-50 Mainstay airborne early warning and control aircraft — whose specific strategic significance merits its own section of this article.
In total, Oryx lists 135 confirmed frontline fighter losses, with the actual number of all aircraft types destroyed likely substantially higher given the methodology's requirement for photographic confirmation. The RAND Corporation's analysis, published in 2024, assessed that the Russian Air Force was at less than 75 per cent of its pre-war strength, factoring in both combat losses and the "imputed losses" that arise from aircraft accumulating flight hours faster than planned — reducing airframe life in ways that remove aircraft from effective service without any single dramatic destruction event.
The Irreplaceable Losses: A-50s, Bombers, and the Su-25 Problem
Not all aircraft losses are equal. A destroyed Su-34 is serious — Su-34s are expensive, sophisticated aircraft that take years to produce and whose loss reduces Russia's strike capacity. But Russia maintains production lines for Su-34s, Su-35Ss, and Su-30SMs, and is currently delivering new fighters at a rate of approximately two to three dozen per year. These losses are painful and cumulative, but they are within the range of what sustained industrial production can partially offset.
The losses that fall outside that range — the irrecoverable losses in Geopolitical Monitor's precise framing — are the ones that will shape Russian air power's ceiling for the next decade regardless of what happens in Ukraine.
The A-50 Mainstay is the platform whose loss carries the most immediate operational consequence. Russia is confirmed to have lost two of its small fleet of these airborne early warning and control aircraft — sophisticated platforms that carry radar systems capable of tracking dozens of targets simultaneously across hundreds of kilometres, coordinating the actions of multiple fighter aircraft, managing the airspace picture, and providing the situational awareness that turns individual aircraft into an integrated fighting force rather than a collection of uncoordinated machines. The Soviet/Russian aerospace industry built only a limited number of A-50s, production effectively ended after the Cold War, and the prospect of replacing them from existing industrial capacity is extremely limited. Each A-50 loss is not merely the loss of an aircraft but the loss of a capability — airspace command and control — that cannot be substituted with any other currently manufactured Russian platform. Ukrainian air defence's success in destroying these high-value, carefully protected platforms has had, in the assessment of multiple defence analysts, a disproportionate operational impact on Russian air campaign effectiveness compared with any equivalent number of tactical fighter losses.
The Tu-22M3 losses are strategically significant for different reasons. The Backfire bomber is a critical component of Russia's non-strategic nuclear arsenal and conventional long-range strike capability. Eleven confirmed losses represent a substantial fraction of Russia's operational Tu-22M3 fleet. These aircraft cannot be replaced. The production line for the Tu-22M3 was shut down decades ago. The aircraft that exist in the Russian inventory are those that were built in the Soviet era and have been maintained, modernised, and operated in the intervening decades. Each combat loss is therefore a permanent reduction in Russia's long-range strike capacity that will persist for as long as Russia's military operates without a direct successor to the Backfire — and no such successor is currently in serial production.
The Su-25 problem is subtly different but similarly concerning. The Su-25 Frogfoot is Russia's primary close air support platform — the aircraft specifically designed to fly in direct support of ground forces, at low altitude, in the contested airspace immediately above a battlefield. It has been one of the most heavily used and most heavily targeted Russian aircraft throughout the Ukraine conflict. 41 confirmed Su-25 losses is a significant degradation of this capability. The production line for the Su-25 no longer exists. Russia can refurbish and modernise existing Su-25s — and has been doing so through the Su-25SM programme — but it cannot manufacture new ones. Every Su-25 destroyed is a permanent reduction in Russia's close air support fleet that its current industrial base cannot address through new production. In a war where ground forces still depend heavily on air support, this is a capability gap that compounds with every additional loss.
Operation Spiderweb: The Drone Attack That Changed the Calculus
The most strategically significant single event in the air power attrition story of 2026 was not a dogfight or a missile exchange. It was a Ukrainian intelligence and special operations raid conducted in January 2026 — Operation Spiderweb — that used AI-guided first-person view drones hidden in civilian trucks to strike multiple Russian air bases deep inside Russian territory in a single coordinated operation.
The results were extraordinary. According to Ukrainian intelligence sources cited by multiple outlets, Operation Spiderweb destroyed an estimated $1 billion in Russian aircraft, munitions arsenals, and fuel depots across five air bases. The specific confirmed losses included 11 aircraft (Su-30s, Su-34s, Su-27s, Su-24s, and MiG-31s), three helicopters (Mi-28, Mi-26, and Mi-8), and one transport aircraft (An-26). The Be-200PS amphibious aircraft at Yeysk airbase was separately confirmed destroyed by satellite imagery. Multiple strategic bombers were reported damaged or destroyed.
The significance of Operation Spiderweb extends beyond the specific aircraft destroyed. It demonstrated that Ukrainian forces have developed the capability to strike Russian air bases deep inside Russian territory — bases that Russia's military had considered outside the range of practical Ukrainian attack and had therefore used as safe havens for high-value aircraft that were kept away from the front line to reduce their exposure to Ukrainian air defences. The demonstration that no Russian air base is now beyond Ukraine's reach has forced Russia to either disperse its highest-value aircraft to even more distant bases — increasing the logistics and fuel burden of operating them — or accept that they remain at risk from the same kind of AI-guided drone attacks that devastated Spiderweb's targets.
The cost asymmetry of Operation Spiderweb is also strategically significant. FPV drones of the type used in the operation cost approximately $500 to $1,000 per unit. The aircraft they destroyed cost hundreds of millions of dollars each. A ratio of approximately one million to one between the cost of the attacking weapon and the cost of the destroyed asset is not sustainable for Russia's defence industrial complex in any scenario where Ukraine can mount operations of this kind at scale and frequency.
The Maintenance Crisis: The Silent Killer of Russian Air Power
The combat losses documented by Oryx and other trackers represent the visible dimension of Russia's air power attrition problem. The less visible but equally serious dimension is the maintenance crisis that RAND's 2024 analysis identified as producing "imputed losses" — aircraft removed from effective service not through destruction but through the accumulation of flight hours beyond their designed limits.
The Russian VKS entered the Ukraine war with a fleet in which slightly more than half the aircraft were over 30 years old — Soviet-era platforms designed and built before the Cold War ended. These airframes had finite service lives that were already being extended through maintenance and modernisation programmes. The pace of combat operations since February 2022 has forced Russian aircraft to accumulate flight hours at rates significantly above their pre-war operational tempo, accelerating the consumption of remaining airframe life at a rate the pre-war maintenance system was not designed to support.
The consequence, as RAND assessed, is that even without being shot down, Russian aircraft are being effectively removed from the force through wear and hours — experiencing component failures, requiring extended maintenance periods, or reaching structural limits that ground them more permanently than any Ukrainian missile. The VKS was assessed to be on track to suffer approximately 60 imputed aircraft losses per year from overuse and ageing, at the time of RAND's 2024 analysis. Against a production rate of approximately 20 to 24 new Su-30, Su-34, and Su-35 aircraft per year, the mathematics of replacement are unfavourable: roughly two to three aircraft leave effective service for every one that enters it.
Western sanctions have compounded the maintenance crisis in specific technical ways. Modern Russian aircraft — including the Su-35S and Su-57 — incorporate foreign-sourced components in their avionics, electronic warfare systems, and communications equipment. Microelectronics, including chips sourced from Western suppliers, are embedded in systems that Russia cannot readily substitute from domestic production. The specific consequence of sanctions-driven component shortages is not that aircraft are immediately grounded — Russia has been able to find workarounds, including through third-country procurement networks and the cannibalisation of components from less-critical platforms — but that the time and cost of maintenance have increased, the availability rate of affected aircraft has decreased, and the long-term sustainability of maintaining current operational tempos is undermined. Russia's most complex military systems — electronic warfare, advanced sensors, communications — are precisely the systems most dependent on components that sanctions have made most difficult to source.
How Russia Has Adapted: Standoff Operations and the Glide Bomb Strategy
Russia's response to the accumulating attrition pressure on its air force has been a fundamental reorientation of how it uses its air assets. Rather than flying aircraft into the contested airspace over the front line — where Ukrainian air defences have demonstrated the ability to destroy even advanced platforms — Russia has increasingly operated its aircraft as mobile launch platforms for standoff weapons: glide bombs and missiles released from distances sufficient to keep the launching aircraft outside the most effective engagement envelopes of Ukraine's ground-based air defences.
The KAB series of glide bombs — Soviet-era bombs fitted with guidance kits that give them precision accuracy and standoff range — have been particularly prominent in this strategy. Russian Su-34s, Su-35Ss, and Su-30SMs carry these weapons and release them from altitudes and distances that are challenging for Ukraine's available air defences to reach consistently, then turn away before penetrating the defended airspace. This approach preserves aircraft from the losses that would result from direct overflight of defended Ukrainian territory while still enabling them to deliver meaningful ordnance on Ukrainian targets.
The standoff strategy has extended Russian air power's effective lifespan in the conflict — buying operational utility from a depleted fleet — but it comes with its own constraints. Standoff weapons cost money, require manufacturing capacity, and are themselves subject to the procurement and logistics challenges that sanctions and wartime industrial pressure create. More fundamentally, a strategy of operating aircraft as distant missile launchers rather than as genuine air superiority or close air support assets represents a significant reduction in the tactical flexibility and operational depth that a functioning air force provides. It is an adaptation to attrition, not a solution to it.
Ukraine's Air Force: Still Standing, Slowly Strengthening
The mirror image of Russia's accumulating air power problem is Ukraine's air force — which, by every early assessment, should not still exist as a functioning entity. Ukraine lost more than 100 fixed-wing aircraft by confirmed count, entered the war with ageing Soviet-era platforms, and faced an adversary with ten times its numerical strength and far more capable equipment. That it has survived as a fighting force at all reflects the success of dispersal tactics, the resilience of Ukrainian pilots and ground crews, and the progressive integration of Western-supplied capabilities.
The F-16 transfer programme — delayed by political and training timelines but now delivering aircraft to Ukrainian squadrons — represents the most significant qualitative shift in Ukraine's air power picture since the war began. F-16s are fourth-generation platforms significantly more capable than any Soviet-era aircraft they replace, and they are available with Western-standard air-to-air missiles and electronic warfare suites that change the parameters of every engagement in which they participate. The Eurofighter deal — for jets that will not arrive until 2035 — represents a longer-term recapitalisation commitment that acknowledges the war's likely multi-year duration and Ukraine's need for a sustainable modernised air arm beyond the current generation of donated aircraft.
The asymmetric capability that has most defined the air war, however, is neither the F-16 nor any other manned platform. It is the drone. Ukraine's development of FPV drones, AI-guided long-range attack drones, and the operational concepts for deploying them against high-value targets deep inside Russia has been the most consequential military innovation of the conflict. The destruction achieved through Operation Spiderweb alone exceeded, by any reasonable valuation metric, the material cost of Ukraine's entire drone development and manufacturing programme many times over.
The Long-Term Picture: What Russian Air Power Looks Like in 2030 and Beyond
The question that the accumulating evidence of Russian air power attrition most urgently raises is not what Russia's air force looks like today — a degraded but still functioning force, adapted to standoff operations, producing new aircraft at a rate insufficient to replace losses — but what it will look like when the Ukraine conflict eventually ends, whether through ceasefire, negotiated settlement, or military decision.
The irreplaceable losses — the A-50s, the Tu-22M3s, the Tu-95s, the Su-25s — will not regenerate. They represent a permanent reduction in specific capability categories that will shape Russian military planning for the coming decade. The maintenance crisis, unless resolved by a peace settlement that relieves operational pressure and allows systematic fleet refurbishment, will continue to remove aircraft from effective service at rates that compound the combat loss picture. The sanctions-driven component shortages that slow maintenance and limit the production of new aircraft will persist for as long as the sanctions regime does — which, in any realistic scenario, will be years even if the Ukraine conflict ends.
The Russian Air Force that emerges from this war will be numerically smaller than the one that entered it, specifically weaker in the irreplaceable high-value categories that provide the capabilities most difficult to substitute through numbers alone, structurally dependent on aircraft significantly older than the pre-war fleet average, and facing a Western-oriented adversary in Ukraine that will retain, and progressively strengthen, the air defence capabilities that have made Russian air operations costly throughout the conflict.
It will still be a large air force — Russia's industrial base and inherited Soviet aviation infrastructure are not destroyed, and the country's production of new Su-34s, Su-35Ss, and Su-30SMs, however modest in pace, continues. The scenario of Russia running out of aircraft entirely is not the realistic risk analysis suggests. The realistic analysis is more nuanced: a Russian air force whose effective strength in the most capable categories has been meaningfully and durably reduced, whose operational doctrine has been forced into a standoff adaptation that limits its tactical flexibility, and whose irreplaceable platform losses have created specific capability gaps — airspace command and control, long-range strategic strike, close air support — that will not be filled for years regardless of what happens on the ground in Ukraine.
That is Russia's air power problem in 2026. It is serious. It is documented. It is a direct consequence of a war that was expected to last weeks and has now lasted more than four years. And it is, by any honest assessment, a problem that is getting worse rather than better.
Sources
- Aerospace Global News — Four Years of War: Counting Russian and Ukrainian Aircraft Losses (February 25, 2026):
https://aerospaceglobalnews.com/news/how-many-aircraft-losses-russia-ukraine/ - Geopolitical Monitor — Russia's Irrecoverable Losses: Industrial Limits and the Future of Strategic Power (June 2026):
https://www.geopoliticalmonitor.com/russias-irrecoverable-losses-industrial-limits-and-the-future-of-strategic-power/ - 19FortyFive — The Russian Air Force Is Running Out of Planes for the War in Ukraine (January 2025):
https://www.19fortyfive.com/2025/01/the-russian-air-force-is-running-out-of-planes-for-the-war-in-ukraine/ - 19FortyFive — The Russian Air Force Keeps Dropping Like Flies in the Ukraine War (November 2025):
https://www.19fortyfive.com/2025/11/the-russian-air-force-keeps-dropping-like-flies-in-the-ukraine-war/ - The National Interest — The Russian Air Force Has Suffered Heavy Losses in Ukraine (April 2025):
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/the-russian-air-force-has-suffered-heavy-losses-in-ukraine - Global Military Net — Russia-Ukraine War Military Losses Tracker (Updated June 2026):
https://www.globalmilitary.net/aircraft_losses/ukraine/ - Oryx (Open Source Intelligence) — Documented Russian Aircraft Losses: Visually Confirmed Equipment Destroyed in Ukraine:
https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-documenting-equipment.html - RAND Corporation — Russian Air Force Attrition Assessment: Below 75% Pre-War Strength (March 2024):
https://www.rand.org/ - Igor Sushko / Twitter — Operation Spiderweb: SBU Alfa Drone Strike Destroys $1 Billion in Russian Air Assets Across 5 Bases (January 28, 2026):
https://twitter.com/igorsushko - Wikipedia — List of Aviation Shootdowns and Accidents During the Russo-Ukrainian War (Updated Continuously):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aviation_shootdowns_and_accidents_during_the_Russo-Ukrainian_war - Newsweek — Russia's Irreplaceable A-50 AWACS Losses and Their Operational Impact:
https://www.newsweek.com/russia-a50-awacs-ukraine-loss-operational-impact - MSN — Russia's Air Power Is Facing a Serious Problem:
https://www.msn.com/en-xl/news/other/russia-s-air-power-is-facing-a-serious-problem/ss-AA262on5