Russia has likely grounded its fleet of A-50 early warning and control aircraft after Ukraine shot down a second one in two months, the UK Ministry of Defense said in an intelligence update on Saturday.
The fleet is likely to remain grounded while internal investigations take place into why the losses happened and how Russia can better combat Ukrainian air defenses, the UK department said.
The A-50 is an airborne radar system that detects enemy aircraft, missiles, and air defense systems. They also provide daily command and control to Russian air operations and identify ground targets.
Before these two losses, Russia was believed to have only eight of the high-value aircraft, which cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build.
Justin Bronk, an air war specialist from the think tank the Royal United Services Institute, previously told the BBC that losing an A-50 with its 15-strong specialist crew would be a “highly operationally significant and embarrassing loss” for Russia’s air force.
Losing these planes from the skies likely “significantly degrades the situational awareness” provided to Russian aircrews, according to the UK department.
Russia has lost three of these high-value planes in total. Kyiv’s forces first hit an A-50 in February 2023, when an exploding drone flew to an air base in Belarus and destroyed an A-50 parked on the runway.
Russia will likely have to explore different options to bridge the gap, including repurposing aircraft and assuming higher risks to deliver the necessary air support its ground forces need, the UK defense department said.
Russia might also attempt to bring previously mothballed A-50 airframes back into service, per the UK MoD.
Ukraine has had a string of recent victories in shooting down other Russian warplanes, claiming to have downed around a doaen in the past month.
Yurii Ihnat, the spokesman for Ukraine’s air force, said that the recent killstreak of 10 Su-34s and two Su-35s was part of the Ukrainian response to an increasingly aggressive Russian aviation presence on the eastern front, RBC-Ukraine reported.
However, the recent losses had forced the Russian jets dropping glide bombs to fly further away to protect themselves, making their bombs less accurate.
“They need to fly closer because the bomb glides. It doesn’t have its own engine. It glides and loses speed. So they need to take risks to strike,” he said, per RBC-Ukraine.
But, he said, “Russian pilots are no longer so impudent, they aren’t flying as close.”
