The Russian Aerospace Forces (VKS), or what many call the Russian Air Force, have lost another Tupolev Tu-22M3 supersonic bomber aircraft. This most recent incident took place on April 3, but not as a result of combat or due to an attack by a long-range Ukrainian drone.
The aircraft crashed in Siberia, killing the pilot, according to the Russian Defense Ministry. According to an MoD spokesman quoted by the state-run TASS news agency, it was conducting a scheduled non-combat flight when it crashed in Siberia’s Irkutsk region.
In what has become an all-too-familiar phrase in the wake of these incidents, the preliminary VKS official finding is that “the crash is believed to have been caused by a technical malfunction.”
The phrase “technical malfunction” is becoming a catchphrase that usually refers to an overworked airframe with too many hours on it, insufficient spare parts, or a flight crew with insufficient hours per month to maintain proficiency—or some combination of all three.
Russia’s air force has suffered mounting losses in the course of the war in Ukraine, but what is becoming more notable is that increasing numbers of these losses have been self-inflicted.
The US General Christopher Cavoli and the head of the US European Command told American lawmakers that by April 2024, Russia had lost around 10 percent of its combat aircraft due to strains on the force caused by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Slow Production—High Losses
This state of affairs has a long legacy.
During Russia’s near-economic collapse in the 1990s, significant Russian combat aircraft industry sectors fell into disrepair or just disappeared. The Sukhoi and, to a lesser extent, Mikoyan aircraft production associations could keep themselves running by export orders. Thanks to purchases from China, India, and others, these fighter aircraft firms managed to avoid going out of business altogether.
However, the factories that built bombers and the design centers that supported them were not so fortunate. No one wanted to buy Soviet bomber aircraft—and even if they had, Russia would not have been anxious to export them.
By the time the economy was recovering in the early 2000s, Russia was back to building the smallest of its newer bomber designs, the Su-34. Ultimately, it was designed to replace all Su-24s in inventory, but those plans were beyond overly ambitious.
Russia once had a fleet of more than 1,400 Su-24s but has only been able to produce 148 Su-34s as the older jets are being retired. As the Ukraine war began, the Su-34’s production only reached single-digit yearly anemic production rates. Meanwhile, the VKS was losing
more than 10 percent of its Su-34 fleet amid the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Since the start of the invasion in February 2022, Russia’s aerospace forces have lost at least 21 Su-34s—or two squadrons worth of aircraft—which were involved in several high-profile losses during the war. This number is according to Oryx, an open-source intelligence website that collects visual evidence of military equipment losses in Ukraine.
Irreplaceable Airframes for Russian Air Force
But if Russian industry can build even meager numbers of its smallest bombers, it has almost no capacity to replace the older-generation Tupolev 1970s Tu-22M, Tu-95, and 1980s Tu-160 models.
Those production lines do not even exist anymore, and losses of the Tu-22M models, such as the one that crashed last week, have occurred regularly. The age of the airframe frequently contributes to those losses.
On 19 April 2024, another VKS Tu-22M3 strategic supersonic bomber of the VKS crashed in southern Russia. The Russian MoD confirmed the aircraft went down in the Krasnogvardeisky district of the Stavropol region while returning to base following the completion of a combat mission.
The MoD claimed the aircraft had no ammunition onboard and that the preliminary investigation determined that (again) a “technical fault” caused the crash.
In contradiction, Ukraine’s Air Force (PSU) commander claims it had shot down the Tu-22M bomber after it fired missiles during an overnight attack on Ukraine. The missile strikes killed eight people, including two children, at Dnipro.
There was no ammunition on board, explained a Ukrainian military intelligence officer, because the missiles it had been carrying had already been launched, had exploded in Ukraine, and had killed innocent Ukrainian civilians.
But what is doing equal damage to the bomber force as Ukraine’s air defense batteries is the lack of proper servicing and spares or not enough training of aircrews. An April 2023 UK MoD Intelligence briefing examined just how many aircraft losses were a consequence of these non-combat factors.
Tupolev Tu-22M3 taking off at Ryazan Dyagilevo.
Tu-22M3M Russian Aircraft. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
“This need for extra maintenance is complicated by a shortage of spare parts because of increasing demand and international sanctions,” concluded the MoD assessment. “The VKS has already experienced difficulties with shortages of long-range precision-guided munitions, but this more recent reporting [of increasing losses] now raises questions about long-term availability of the platforms required to launch them.”
The Tu-22M was also a problem for the VKS even before the war. In January 2019, more than three years before the war began, a Tu-22M on a training mission crashed in the far north of Russia on the Kola peninsula. Even at this point, these aircraft were being flown for many more hours than they were designed for, and the war has exacerbated this trend.
A RAND report from August 2023 explained, “In the first few months of the war in Ukraine, the VKS was flying as many as 150 to 300 sorties per day—compared with the peacetime rate of roughly 60 per day. Even dropping to 100 sorties a day since, the VKS has basically flown double its normal annual hours since the beginning of the war.”
About the Author: Reuben F. Johnson
Reuben F. Johnson is a survivor of the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and is an Expert on Foreign Military Affairs with the Fundacja im. Kazimierza Pułaskiego in Warsaw. He has been a consultant to the Pentagon, several NATO governments, and the Australian government in the fields of defense technology and weapon systems design. Over the past 30 years he has resided in and reported from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Brazil, the People’s Republic of China and Australia.
