The Russians Just Blew Up A Hard-To-Replace Ukrainian Attack Jet. Too Bad For Them, It Was

Looks like the Ukrainian air force finally has learned its lesson. Two months after losing a pair of precious warplanes in back-to-back Russian drone strikes on an airfield in southern Ukraine, the air force has swapped out real planes at the vulnerable base with at least one fake one.

A video that circulated online on Thursday depicts one of Russia’s explosives-laden Lancet drones striking what might look like a Ukrainian air force Sukhoi Su-25 attack jet.

Look closer. The final few frames of the optically-guided Lancet’s video reveal that the Su-25’s wings don’t blend with its fuselage-mounted inlets. It seems the thing the Lancet blew up was a decoy.

Decoys, including inflatable and wooden mockups and stripped-down derelict vehicles, are in widespread use on both sides of Russia’s wider war on Ukraine. That the Ukrainian air force apparently has set up decoys at Dolgintsevo air base near Kryvyi Rih indicates the service finally appreciates how vulnerable the base has become.

The Dolgintsevo air base is just 45 miles from the front line. For the first 18 months of the wider war, that was far enough.

Russian warplanes almost never venture past the front line, and Russian cruise missiles, launched by easy-to-detect heavy bombers, travel so slowly that Ukrainian forces—even those operating just 50 miles from the line of contact—usually have ample advance notice of an incoming strike.

The 25-pound, propeller-driven Lancets, by contrast, are expendable and difficult to detect. What protected Dolgintsevo air base prior to this fall was the short range—just 25 miles or so—of the standard Lancet model, the Product 51.

Then the Russians introduced the new Product 53, an extended-range Lancet that can travel up to 45 miles. Russian state media described the Product 53 as “the next step in the evolution of the Lancet—and one which, designers hope, will become nearly impossible to stop.”

The first few Product 53s took the Urkainian regiments at Dolgintsevo air base by surprise. A Lancet blew up a Mikoyan MiG-29 fighter in its revetment at the base on or right before Sept. 19. On or before Oct. 10, a second Product 53 struck an Su-25—apparently a real, flyable one—at the base.

The twin drone strikes underscored apparent gaps in Ukrainian air-defenses between the front line and Kryvyi Rih. Ukraine has concentrated many of its best air-defenses—S-300s, Patriots, NASAMS, IRIS-Ts and Gepards—around major cities such as Kyiv, Kharkiv and Odesa, sometimes leaving troops and bases elsewhere less well-protected.

Ukraine’s territorial defense forces have plugged some of these gaps by forming mobile flak groups armed with autocannons and machine guns—including some World War I-vintage Maxims. These air-defense teams even work at night, scanning the darkened sky with spotlights and infrared sights.

It’s not clear the territorial flak groups, or similar units run by the air force, protect Dolgintsevo air base. In the apparent absence of active defenses, the Ukrainians have deployed passive defenses—installing at least one decoy warplane to lure Russian drones away from real warplanes.