On or just before Monday, a Russian surveillance drone winged from Russian lines to the Ukrainian air force’s Mirgorod air base, 100 miles from Ukraine’s northern border with Russia.
The drone spotted at least six Ukrainian Sukhoi Su-27 supersonic fighters parked in the open at the base in broad daylight. A Russian Iskander missile barreled in, destroying two of the precious Sukhois and damaging the other four.
It may have been one of the costliest single days for the battered Ukrainian air arm since Russia widened its war on Ukraine in February 2022. “There are some losses,” air force official Yuriy Ignat acknowledged.
Ukrainian bloggers rushed to blame the air force officers who ordered the Su-27 crews to park their jets out in the open at a base dangerously close to the front line. “A million years of war, sheep do not learn anything,” one blogger moaned.
The raid on Mirgorod is just the latest in a series of Russian strikes on vulnerable Ukrainian air bases. In recent months, Russian Lancet drones have struck at least four Ukrainian jets at Dolgintsevo air base near Kryvyi Rih, just 45 miles from the front line in southern Ukraine.
The first two strikes, last fall, took the Ukrainian air force by surprise—and blew up a pair of Mikoyan MiG-29 fighters. The third strike in November seemingly struck an unflyable decoy Sukhoi Su-25 attack jet. But then a fourth drone raid hit a flyable Su-25.
The two Su-27s that Iskander wrecked at Mirgorod bring to at least five the number of Ukrainian warplanes the Russians have blown up on the ground in the last nine months or so. These are losses the Ukrainians can’t afford.
The Ukrainian air force went to war in February 2022 with around 125 Su-27s, Su-25s, MiG-29s and other jets. In 28 months of hard fighting, the Ukrainians have lost around 90 jets that the analysts at Oryx have confirmed.
To make good their losses, the Ukrainians have acquired from their allies, or restored from long-term storage, scores of replacement MiGs and Sukhois. These airframes are keeping the air force in action until ex-European fighters—85 Lockheed Martin F-16s and perhaps a dozen Dassault Mirage 2000s—arrive in Ukraine.
The problem, of course, is that the F-16s and Mirages will also be vulnerable to Russian drone and missile strikes as long as they’re parked in the open in broad daylight.
There are obvious steps Ukrainian commanders could take to protect their planes. For starters—pull operational jets away from the bases closest to Russia.
Ukrainian forces have access to around 20 large air bases, dozens of smaller airfields and even highway airstrips scattered across the country. Every single Ukrainian jet type ranges hundreds of miles on internal fuel. There’s no reason for an Su-27 that ranges 700 miles to spend any time at an airfield a hundred miles from the front line.
But moving warplanes farther from the front probably isn’t enough—not as long as the Russians possess ballistic and cruise missiles that can strike across Ukraine. In addition to vacating the most vulnerable bases, Ukrainian commanders could keep their planes and crews moving.
Ukrainian fighter brigades normally stress unpredictability—all in order to complicate Russian targeting. Their pilots “almost never take off from an airfield and land at the same airfield,” said Gen. James Hecker, the commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe and Africa.
The uptick in Russian strikes on parked planes should compel the Ukrainians to be even more unpredictable. At the same time, they could build reinforced shelters to shield parked jets while they aren’t on the move—and also deploy more decoys. “The air force is doing everything it can to counter the enemy, mislead the enemy, including through mock-ups and other means,” Ignat insisted.
Whatever the Ukrainians choose to do to protect their planes, they need to move quickly in the face of unrelenting Russian attacks. “Systemic negligence may get us all six feet under in this war,” Ukrainian journalist and author Illia Ponomarenko warned.
What’s especially galling, for supporters of a sovereign Ukraine, is that Russian jets are equally vulnerable at their own bases near Ukraine. But in some cases, U.S. policy prohibits the Ukrainians from striking those jets with American-made weapons.
Update, July 3: Similar Russian strikes on Ukrainian airfields on Tuesday and Wednesday destroyed or badly damaged at least two more Ukrainian aircraft.
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Sources:
1. War Vehicle Tracker: https://x.com/WarVehicle/status/1807855178386694413
2. Mykolaiv Vanyok: https://t.me/vanek_nikolaev/24755
3. Oryx: https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-documenting-ukrainian.html
4. Gen. James Hecker: https://x.com/paulmcleary/status/1701618184753652098
5. Illia Ponomarenko: https://x.com/IAPonomarenko/status/1807874971940933827
6. Yuriy Ignat: https://www.facebook.com/yuriy.ignat/posts/7917666638255359
