--- title: "Russia's Air Force is in Crisis" description: "Russia's air force faces a hidden crisis beyond battlefield losses. Forced to operate from distant bases to avoid Ukrainian strikes, aircraft accumulate unprecedented flight hours, rapidly exhausting limited lifespans. With Soviet-era designs requiring frequent maintenance and spare parts increasingly scarce, the fleet faces accelerating degradation, crashes, and looming operational collapse." url: https://fronts.co/videos/russias-air-force-is-in-crisis.md canonical: https://fronts.co/videos/russias-air-force-is-in-crisis/ datePublished: 2026-10-31T17:00:29.000Z dateModified: 2026-10-31T17:00:29.000Z author: - name: Fronts Staff url: https://fronts.co/authors/fronts-team/ publisher: Fronts image: "https://media.fronts.co/cdn-cgi/image/width=1200,height=630,fit=cover,gravity=auto,quality=80,format=auto/images/video-library/warfronts-global-768.webp" type: NewsArticle language: en access: members isAccessibleForFree: false tokens: 5306 --- On the eve of February 23rd, 2022, the Russian Aerospace Forces, commonly known as VKS, was on paper the second largest airpower in the world behind only the US armed forces. Were Moscow to actually go through with its invasion of Ukraine, most analysts assumed they would quickly establish air superiority and crush the Ukrainian military? Well, as you know, that didn 't happen. What happened instead was a combination of complacent planning and underestimating Ukraine, which led to a shocking number of aircraft losses, so shocking that the VKS stopped flying missions over Ukrainian held territory. Turns out, Russia's much-wanted lessons from Syria only applied to flying over and dropping bombs on people without air defenses. Since then, the VKS has suffered far fewer losses than the Kremlin's land forces or Black Sea Fleet. Combined with the production of new combat aircraft, it might even look like the Russian Air Force is as powerful as it was before the war. But notice the key words there. It might look like. Because while social media has focused on spectacular aircraft shootdowns, the real issue facing the VKS is both far less visible and far more pedestrian. Force back from the front lines by Ukrainian attacks on air bases and forced to fly ever-increasing numbers of missions to drop glide bombs or try to shoot down drones over Western Russia, the fleet is now racking up far more flight hours than it was ever designed for, even in wartime. And when your fleet is mostly made up of old Soviet equipment, that, at least in some cases, barely has enough spare parts lying around for peacetime, well, you can see how this might become a major problem. In short, Russia's Air Force is currently going through a silent crisis of wear and tear, one that, at best, is burning through spare parts or forcing aircraft into retirement, and one that at worst is leading to crashes and the deaths of hard-to-replace crew. The Anatomy of Losses Evaluating the status of an Air Force by its battlefield losses is a little like glancing at a guy who works out and, assuming he'll live to be 100, while ignoring his five-pack a day cigarette habit. Modern combat aircraft are incredibly complex systems that regularly operate under the stress of extreme conditions, all while their designers made drastic engineering sacrifices to keep their weight as low as possible to maximize performance. This in practice means that there is only a certain number of flights or flight hours that a modern combat aircraft can endure before it needs either a factory overhaul or to be sent off into retirement. And while this is true of ball machines that go boom boom in wartime, it's true of aircraft than for others. After all, if your tank or ship breaks, there's a decent chance that they can be recovered and towed back to base or back to port. If your aircraft breaks down, it tends to fall out of the sky and kill everybody on board. That's a major problem when you consider that training up a single combat pilot costs millions of dollars and takes years. In defense economics, this underpins the concept of something called imputed losses. An imputed loss is the destruction of military assets not through getting on the wrong side of an exploding thing, but through factors like wear and structural fatigue. For example, if 100 fighter aircraft with a total engineering lifespan of 5,000 flight hours, each log 500 hours of intensive combat flights in a single year, you have effectively lost 10 aircraft, even if the enemy's air defense consists of a man with a big pointy stick. In high-intensity conflicts like Ukraine, the rate of these imputed losses can outpace the speed of building new replacements and the rate of actual combat losses. So, you can end up in weird situation whereby your fleet looks menacing on paper, but from a mechanical point of view, it's being eaten alive. Depending on the age and the state of your fleet, the practical upshot can be anything from the inconvenience of having to buy more fighter jets than your defense budget planned for to see in your military capacity dramatically crumble in the middle of a war. For the VKS, this process is especially devastating because Soviet aircraft designs always had significantly shorter lifespans than their western equivalents. Even later Russian modernizations which narrowed this gap are still far from capable of logging the sort of flight time their western equivalents can rack up. A Soviet era, Su-27 or a MiG -29, for example, has a lifespan of around 3,000 hours while a modern Russian Su-35 can hold out for some 6,000 hours. An F-16 by contrast can go all the way up to over 10,000 hours. And none of this gets any better when you account for the fact that older aircraft tend to need more maintenance work and need to have more components replaced. This can be a real problem when specific aircraft and some of their components are just no longer in production. So, when the three-day Special Military Operations turned into a traditional logging match against a country with the largest set of air defenses in Europe and support from most NATO nations, it completely threw a wrench into VKS operational planning. Prior to Ukraine, the VKS had only ever expected to fight two types of conflicts, short and localised ones that it would win easily, or a Titanic showdown with NATO, in which case it would lose so many aircraft so quickly that wear and tear wouldn't have time to become an issue. As such, the sheer unforgiving length of the Ukraine war has taken a serious toll. And that's before we even discuss Ukraine's growing long-range strike capabilities, a which have forced the VKS to maintain a constant presence along a 1,200-kil ometre front, combined with defensive commitments all over Western Russia and even over parts of Siberia. In short, the scale of Russian combat aircraft use is currently at unprecedented heights. Combine that with forced retirements and crashes, and the result is likely a loss of operational airframes that goes way beyond the numbers lost in combat. Now, before we really get into the weeds, we should note that after the initial losses scaling back of high-risk operations of the start of the war, the VKS-O is still flying significant numbers of combat missions. It was only the compounding of multiple factors over a long period of time that brought them to where they are now, operating at an unsustainable level. Of these, the biggest factor was probably the Ukrainian effort to target Russian aircraft and helicopters at their air bases. Since very few air bases of hardened aircraft shelters with aircraft usually just being parked in the open, it doesn't take much to damage or destroy them. So you might ask, "Why not just surround the bases with air defenses?" The trouble is that even Russia, with the world's largest collection of air defenses, can't cover everywhere at once. To fences have to be deployed to other high-value targets, major cities, at Putin's holiday homes, oftentimes leaving certain air bases vulnerable. The result has been a series of devastating attacks on air bases in both occupied parts of Ukraine and in regions of Russia near Ukraine, using everything from ancient Soviet-era "tochka" ballistic missiles and small drones launched by sabotage groups to hordes of one-way attack drones. The obvious solution here would be for the Kremlin to move its planes further away from the front, which is what they did, both to remove the threat from some systems with limited reach, like "tochka" and "attack" ballistic missiles, and to provide more warning time to its aircraft so that they could take off before the long- range drones managed to reach a target air base. And this is where the whole "wear and tear" thing comes in. Because they are today taking off from bases far further from the front, more flight hours are required for pretty much all combat operations. And in the case of some strategic assets, this went to such an extreme that airborne radar aircraft are now mostly operating from central Russia, while strategic bombers are now mostly based in the far north of the Kola Peninsula and in remote air bases in the Far East, which means every cruise missile strike mission against Ukraine might involve putting 15-20 flight hours on their aging airframes. And then there's the issue of those early warnings about incoming drones. While it's obviously better for Russia to fly its planes away from an air base that may be being targeted by long-range drones than have them go boom, those escape flights still have more flight hours onto the airframe. And it's not like the equation is usually as simple as failure to fly equals destroyed plane, often the drones being warned against are going nowhere near the airbase, which means the aircraft are often just wasting hours of their flight time flying in circles until the drone threat ends. This cycle repeats multiple times a week across dozens of air bases all over western and southern Russia, and its greatest toll is being placed on Russian combat aircraft that are conducting missions in or near Ukraine. In other words, the most relevant Russian aircraft for the war are suffering a disproportionate amount of wear and tear. And then there are the tactics the VKS is using against the Ukrainian Air Force Since the war's early days, the VKS has been trying to gradually destroy the Ukrainian Air Force by flying constant combat air patrols relatively close to the front line just beyond the range of surface-to-air missiles. If they locate one of the low-flying Ukrainian fighters or strike aircraft, they can launch long-range anti-aircraft missiles at them, accepting that while an overwhelming majority will miss, occasionally some Ukrainian aircraft will not be warned in time or its pilot will make a mistake and be shot down. In practice, the problem is that doing this more or less constantly along a 1200km front line eats up a huge amount of flight hours. This has gotten even worse since these aircraft began flying from more distant bases, leaving them all with less fuel and less time on station. In turn, meaning that more aircraft flights have to be used to carry out this mission. As a bonus, the best Russian fighter interceptor is the MiG-31, which has been about a production for decades and has notoriously high maintenance requirements and a relatively short lifespan. For example, its engine needs to be overhauled or replaced after just 300 flight hours. So, for what few shootdowns and deterrence against the Ukrainian Air Force the VKS achieves this way, it is paying for them dearly by rapidly using up the remaining lifespan of its aging interceptor fleet. At the same time, the VKS has been forced to dedicate a significant portion of its fighter jet and helicopter fleets to constant combat air patrols, specifically tasked with hunting down the ever-increasing number of Ukrainian drones and cruise missiles. And while you would think that old fighter jets, still operational, but no longer suitable for frontline use, would be perfect for this task, the drone's mostly plastic construction and slow speed often makes them difficult to track on the old rad ars found aboard the un-modernized versions of these aircraft. Combine this with the unwillingness to risk losing semi-stealthy Su-57s over Ukraine for PR reasons, and you get to see them relegated to flying combat missions against cheap, slow drones over central Russia. Even areas where Russia has gained the upper hands have come at the expense of its airframes, or in a notable development over the last couple of years has been the explosion in the number of glide bombs used by Russian forces. Old aircraft bombs, with new glide and guidance kits attached to them, glide bombs have proved a cheap and relatively effective way to hit Ukrainian forces from a safe distance. As such, the Russians are pumping them out, and while 10,000 such strike missions were recorded in 20 23, the number this year is expected to crest 80,000. But because these strike aircraft need to be escorted on every mission by dedicated fighter jets like the Su-35, this has become yet another mission type, consuming a lot of flight hours for many of Russia's most modern combat airframes. Again, the key we want to impress upon you is that all of this leads to additional wear and tear. In pretty much all of these cases, you could argue that flying these missions is the rational choice in wartime. The problem is that these missions being rational does not mean they magically reduce the strain on the aircraft. And with the war now running for nearly five years, all of those endless stacking flight hours are going to have an impact. Public outcry As the structural degradation of the VKS fleet has accelerated, the reality of this crisis has begun to bleed onto social media via Russian military aviation channels that are reporting on the war. The most significant of these is the fighter bomber telegram account run by an influential retired fighter bomber pilot with the extensive connections to active duty VKS personnel. In a recent high profile post, the channel began complaining bitterly about the insane and unsustainable number of flight hours being placed on VKS aircraft as well as on the pilots and maintenance crews. In his telling, Russian aircraft are currently logging thousands, plural, of flight hours every single year. Even if this is an exaggeration, and the truth is closer to 1,000 flight hours a year instead of thousands, that would still mean massively comp ressing the normal operational life of combat aircraft to just a few years. At that point, anything recently made would need a factory-based life extension, while the older aircraft that started this war with years of service already behind them would be pushed into early retirement. Fighter bombers' disclosures also highlighted a very real human cost. It's not just the metal airframes that have been subjected to extensive fatigue, but also the maintenance personnel and aircraft crews. Ground crews, especially, have been working long shifts for years now, often exposed to the elements while attempting to patch up complex electronic and hydraulic systems. This combination of exhausted personnel and aircraft that are flying a decade's worth of flight hours in just a year or two, has created a high-risk environment where critical failures are bound to happen. One such failure happened on September 29th, when a 295MS bear strategic missile carrier spectacularly crashed shortly after takeoff from Ukraine carer base in the Far East and Amur at last. The 295MS is a decade old, heavy, four-engined turboprop strategic bomber that has been serving as the main platform for launching cruise missiles at Ukrainian infrastructure and cities. Reports from Russian aviation circles indicated that the bomber suffered a failure of three of its four massive Kuznetsov NK-12 turboprop engines, which made it impossible for the bomber to return to its airbase, with everyone on board being killed in the resulting crash. A triple-engine failure on a strategic asset is something that should be practically impossible. It's only when you're flying aircraft beyond their safe engineering lifespan with an intensive rate of combat operations while also refurbishing them with parts looted from retired airframes that you get a failure on this scale. Nor is this the only example. Less than a month later on October 21, the Russian tactical multi-role fleet was hit by a bizarre case of two separate crashes of the same aircraft model on the same day. The first aircraft, a Su-30 SM operating out of the Chen Kofsk district, reportedly suffered an unspecified catastrophic malfunction during a routine training flight, with the crew ejecting and being recovered with some injuries. Just hours later, a second Su-30SM crashed in the Moscow region, this time with fatal consequences for the crew. In short, there are real-world consequences to pushing these aircrafts beyond their limit, consequences that are only going to get more severe the longer this war goes on for. The Industrial Choke Point Now onto normal circumstances. An air force is supposed to carefully manage the degradation of its aircraft fleet by avoiding excessive wear and tear, as well as by sending aircraft to specialized facilities for a major overhaul to extend their lives or retiring them before they become too dangerous to operate. The problem is that these relevant specialized facilities only have so much capacity to do this kind of work. Meanwhile, the wartime pressure means that combat missions have to be flown even if it degrades the lifespan of remaining aircraft. And while production of new combat aircraft is more or less keeping pace with combat losses and crashes, it is far from being able to compensate for the incredible rate of wear and tear that the VKS is putting on its aircraft. The problem is especially significant for aircraft that no longer have their critical components in production. This usually results in the gradual cannibalization of the aircraft fleet by stripping components from one aircraft to repair another. But this practice has its limits. Already worn out components from donor aircraft don't last long, meaning that you eventually, at a point where the remaining number of operational aircraft just falls off a cliff. To explain we got the writer of this episode to whip up a handy four-step guide to what this might look like in real life. Due to his nature, he decided to call it the fleet degradation doob spiral. Step 1. As donor aircraft are stripped, the total pool of available airframe shrinks. Step 2. The remaining operational aircraft must fly even more hours to meet the combat mission requirements. Step 3. This increased workload, combined with getting already worn out replacement components instead of new ones, accelerates the wear on the surviving aircraft, pushing them toward breakdown, and themselves becoming donor airframes even faster. And finally, step 4. As the remaining aircraft fleet of that type shrinks, certain critical components stop being available at all, crashing the viability of using the remaining aircraft. All of which brings us to the major question that we've been circling for the last 18 minutes. Exactly! What does this all mean for the VKS and the wider Ukraine war? Well, the simple version is that, while the Russian Air Force continues to exert significant pressure in Ukraine and is still, on paper, the third largest airforce in the world, its silent crisis is quickly degrading the effective fleet size. Today, many of its aircraft are practically on their last legs and in need of being replaced in the near future. As the VKS could, in theory, keep those aircraft listed as operational, but that will mean either an increasing rate of crashes or those aircraft in practice just sitting on the ground and only existing on paper. The prime example of this problem is the aircraft that VKS inherited from the USSR, like the MiG-29, Su-24, 25, 27, and so on. On paper, these still represent a very large percentage of the whole VKS fixed-wing aircraft fleet. But in practice, many are no longer flying regularly, if at all. Combine that with putting the greatest load of combat missions on its most recent combat aircraft, like the Su-34 and Su-35, the VKS is effectively blowing out its future force. When the war in Ukraine eventually ends, the VKS will find itself possessing an inventory that is structurally compromised. Right now, it would take far more money than the VKS budget provides to produce new combat aircraft at the rate necessary to at least keep its operational aircraft fleet stable. And that wartime budget, which has allowed the VKS to pay for 50-60 new aircraft per year, is inevitably going to shrink it this time. And don't forget that the money for new aircraft will need to compete with expensive work on the development of future aircraft models if the VKS doesn't want to be left technologically behind. In other words, the most likely outcome of the Russian air war against Ukraine is that Russian air power will, over time, continue shrinking as current aircraft have to be retired before they can be replaced. And that leaves us with the sight of a once powerful air force that still looks huge on paper, but is quickly shrinking with many of its older aircraft not even being relevant against its main potential opponent in the form of NATO air forces. And while that might be small comfort to the Ukrainians currently being bombed by these craft, it does at the least suggest that the VKS may end the war in worse shape than anyone could have possibly imagined. Thank you for watching.