Russia’s “Air Force” Is a TOTAL Joke…Even US Can’t Believe How Bad It Is

Russia’s air force is collapsing—right now.

In
real time.

Warplanes are failing mid-air.

Engines are shutting down.

Bombs are falling off aircraft
during takeoff.

And in some cases—Russia is losing jets without Ukraine even firing a shot.

This
is the air force that was supposed to dominate the skies.

Instead, it’s breaking itself.

And
that’s what makes this such a historic failure Putin can’t hide.

Because when Russia launched its
so-called “special military operation” in February 2022, the outcome in the air seemed inevitable.

Western analysts expected Russian air superiority within days.

The Russian Aerospace Forces entered
the war with around 1,500 combat aircraft—more than 12 times Ukraine’s pre-war fleet.

It fielded
advanced fighters like the Su-35S, Su-30SM, and Su-34, backed by long-range air defenses,
strategic bombers, and airborne radar systems.

By most estimates, Ukraine’s air force wasn’t
supposed to last a week.

To make matters worse, Ukraine’s fleet was a patchwork of aging
Soviet-era aircraft, many poorly maintained after years of underfunding.

But a funny thing
happened on the way to air superiority.

Russia has actually done much worse than expected, with its
air force deteriorating from month to month during the four years of the war.

You see, the Russian
Air and Space Forces (or VKS) entered this war with a fundamental problem: its entire military
doctrine was built around a defensive model.

Russian pilots were trained to operate under
constant guidance from ground controllers, intercepting incoming threats rather than
leading complex offensive campaigns in contested airspace.

When forced to fly deep penetration
missions over a country armed with modern surface-to-air missiles, MANPADS, radar networks,
and increasingly capable Western fighter aircraft, Russian aviation revealed structural cracks that
no number of planes could paper over.

Unable to suppress Ukrainian air defenses, Russian jets
retreated to standoff tactics, but the missions never stopped.

And that relentless tempo is now
eating the fleet alive.

The clearest window yet into the VKS’s deteriorating condition came
in March 2026, when the Ukrainian OSINT group OsintFlow published a classified Russian military
flight safety report covering just three weeks of operations from December 29, 2025, to January
18, 2026.

The document had not been officially acknowledged by Moscow, but it bears all the
hallmarks of genuine Russian military internal reporting.

Notably, even the Russian air force’s
own unofficial Telegram channel, Fighterbomber, which regularly debunks Ukrainian claims, did
not attempt to dispute the document.

What the document reveals is striking.

In a span
of less than three weeks, Russian military aviation logged 24 separate incidents across at
least 18 airfields and bases.

But these weren’t combat losses from Ukraine, making bold efforts
to launch drone strikes deep into Russia.

Instead, they were almost universally mechanical failures,
crew errors, and structural problems that brought aircraft down without a single Ukrainian missile
being fired.

And the most prevalent problem? Basic engine failure.

Indeed, nine of the 24 events
logged involved the same two cockpit warnings: “metal shavings in oil” and “low oil pressure,”
followed by throttle reduction, engine shutdown, and single-engine emergency landings.

The affected
aircraft ranged from the Su-34 and Su-30SM to the Su-35S and even transport aircraft like the An-124
and Il-76.

The same failure mode, across entirely different airframes, at different bases, with no
common mission type.

The pattern bears all the hallmarks of systemic maintenance and industrial
collapse throughout the Russian air force.

The most damning single entry in the document
involves Su-30SM2 tail number 91.

On January 4, 2026, the aircraft triggered the “metal shavings
in oil, right engine” alert mid-flight, shut down the right engine, and landed at Millerovo air base
with only one engine running.

Five days later, a report on the same aircraft showed it experienced
the same problem: The same engine, the same alert, the same single-engine landing at Millerovo.

It’s fair to say that Russia botched repairs and returned the aircraft to supposedly active service
without fixing the underlying fault.

Aviation expert Anatolii Khrapchynskyi had flagged broader
issues in a 2025 interview, explaining that Russia’s loss of access to Ukraine’s Motor Sich
and Ivchenko-Progress engine manufacturers in 2014 severely impacted parts of its aviation sector,
particularly transport and helicopter fleets, and its import substitution program has struggled
ever since.

The repeated failure of Su-30SM2 tail 91 is instead a stark illustration of maintenance
and sustainment challenges within the force.

Then things went from the sublime to the ridiculous.

On January 3, 2026, a Su-34 conducting a combat mission against Ukraine experienced something
that sounds almost impossible: a FAB-500 guided glide bomb fell off the aircraft at the moment
of wheels-up without being commanded.

The bomb, equipped with a UMPK guidance kit, landed a
few hundred feet ahead of the runway in the direction of takeoff.

Even more shockingly,
the pilot continued the mission anyway as if they didn’t just lose one piece of munitions that
would be used to strike Ukraine from afar.

This wasn’t even an isolated event.

Monitoring outlet
Astra has tracked at least 10 Russian aerial bombs falling on Russian or Russian-occupied territory
in 2026 up to March 5, after noting at least 143 such incidents in 2025 and 165 in 2024.

It turns
out that glide bombs, which are arguably Russia’s primary offensive weapon, are spontaneously
dropping onto its own territory at a decelerating rate.

The report also documents a Mi-8 helicopter
returning to its base at Dzhankoi in occupied Crimea on January 2, 2026, after a night combat
mission when there were two loud bangs near the tail boom and a complete loss of yaw control.

The
crew brought it in on the third approach using the fixed-wing technique, which is a harrowing
recovery normally reserved for aircraft with completely inoperable tail rotors.

Post-flight
inspection found a nearly foot-by-foot hole in the tail boom, severed cable runs, a destroyed HF
radio antenna, and a flat metal fragment roughly the size of a sheet of printer paper found in
the cargo cabin after it had punched through the sliding door and struck the armored plate of
the cockpit.

OsintFlow assessed the damage profile as consistent with a fragment from a Russian air
defense missile, not combat contact with Ukrainian forces.

In other words, Russian air defense may
have shot down its own helicopter.

Just let that settle in for a moment.

Russia at this point is
widely considered to have one of the most advanced anti-air systems in the world after investing
decades into creating programs that could go toe-to-toe with American designs.

And even if
anti-air systems didn’t exactly perform as well as expected, shooting allied planes is a real low.

Of
course, there were plenty more so-called incidents during the three-week window in the OsintFlow
report, including: An Su-35S that clipped its own hardened shelter gate while taxiing out,
damaging its Khibiny electronic warfare pod; A MiG-31BM that blew a main landing gear tire after
its drag chute failed; A Ka-52M attack helicopter that suffered a complete hydraulic system failure
during a night combat sortie made a forced field landing.

And a Tu-134A transport that cracked
its commander’s windscreen just 13 minutes into flight.

Considering their severity and apparent
commonalities, it’s safe to say that Russia’s air fleet is trying to perform and make sorties
under conditions it was never designed for.

Case in point, the Russian Air Force has actually
been flying its aircraft at extreme tempos since its Syria campaign in 2015, and that pace has
multiplied several times over since February 2022.

According to the RAND Corporation analysis
from 2024, the VKS was flying its aircraft at roughly two to four times their intended annual
flight hours.

Now, under normal peacetime usage, an aircraft like the Su-35S would have its Saturn
AL-41F1S engine undergo a full maintenance check after approximately 1,000 flight hours.

But in
actual wartime scenarios, the plane has to fly in low-altitude and follow terrain to avoid radar,
repeatedly use the afterburner to hightail it out of Ukrainian territory after delivering the glide
bomb, and maneuver out of enemy anti-air defenses.

The “recommended” maintenance interval suddenly
constricts from 1,000 to just 700 or even 500 flight hours.

RAND estimated that overuse alone
was costing Russia around 26 aircraft per year in so-called “imputed losses,” meaning aircraft
not destroyed in combat but permanently or semi-permanently grounded from metal fatigue and
wear.

By late 2023, those imputed losses already numbered around 60 airframes.

By now, that figure
is considerably higher.

And it gets worse for Russia.

Open-source intelligence organization Oryx
has visually confirmed the destruction or capture of at least 40 Su-34s, up to 8 Su-35s, at least
170 fixed-wing aircraft in total, and around 170 helicopters.

Even Russia’s higher-value assets
have not been spared.

Ukraine has shot down at least two Beriev A-50U radar planes, each worth
approximately $300 million, using a combination of US-supplied Patriot surface-to-air missiles
and a Soviet-era S-200 long-range missile system operating in unconventional radar-off missile
engagement modes.

These A-50s are essentially irreplaceable since Russia doesn’t have the
industrial capacity and the ability to import the necessary parts due to sanctions.

The “coup
de grace” came in June 2025, when Ukrainian drones struck five Russian airbases housing active
strategic bombers deep inside Russian territory in a single night, destroying or heavily damaging at
least two Tu-22M and four Tu-95 strategic bombers.

Not only are these assets worth hundreds of
millions of dollars each, but they are also one of the primary ways Russia was projecting
force through nuclear deterrence.

Operation Spiderweb reportedly damaged or destroyed around
40 military aircraft in total, targeting not just finished aircraft but Russia’s production capacity
itself.

Ukraine’s ability to strike these targets, but more importantly to defend itself against
a numerically superior enemy, has also been vastly enhanced by the steady arrival of Western
aircraft.

Before 2024, Ukraine was flying an aging Soviet-era fleet of MiG-29s, Su-27s, and Su-25s,
platforms that Russia knew inside and out and whose tactical limitations were well understood.

But the delivery of F-16s from the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, and Belgium started to change
that equation.

The Netherlands alone completed delivery of 24 F-16s in May 2025, with Norway
contributing 14, Denmark committing to 19, and Belgium pledging 30 more by 2028.

France then
sent six Mirage 2000-5 aircraft throughout 2025, and Sweden announced a letter of intent in October
2025 to explore the export of up to 150 Saab JAS 39 Gripen-E aircraft.

In particular, the F-16 and
Mirages have already been used operationally to intercept Russian cruise missiles.

These aircraft
gave Ukraine NATO-standard avionics, radar, and beyond-visual-range missile capability that
Soviet-era jets apparently couldn’t match.

Russia, for the first time in the war, found itself facing
jets it had no real knowledge of countering.

That uncertainty, combined with Ukrainian point
defense networks using Patriot, NASAMS, and IRIS-T systems, has made Russian pilots increasingly
reluctant to push into contested airspace at all.

But if you want to learn more about how exactly
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We post daily videos which cover every development in the war as well as global
geopolitics updates.

Beyond Ukraine’s advancement in avionics, Russia’s doctrinal response has
basically been a point of contention for Western analysts.

With no way to exert air dominance over
Ukraine after failing to do so in the opening months, when the opportunity was greatest, Russia
leaned ever more heavily on glide bombs.

These are Soviet-era FAB-500, FAB-1500, and even FAB-3000
bombs fitted with simple guidance and wing kits that let aircraft release them from 20 to 30
miles away and return immediately to safety.

After starting with a steady cascade of a few dozen
bombs per week in early 2023, the most recent estimates suggested Russia used as many as 100
bombs per day across the front by the end of 2025.

The strategy has been militarily effective in
terms of hitting Ukrainian positions.

But glide bomb sorties don’t eliminate flight hours.

Takeoff, transit to the launch zone, weapons release, and return to base still accumulate wear
on every component.

Russia might have found a way to reduce the risk to its pilots while maintaining
the operational tempo, but it hasn’t found a way to reduce the wear on its engines.

The leaked
flight safety report makes this tragically clear: nine engine failures in three weeks, in aircraft
being used primarily for glide bomb delivery runs, is the direct result of flying a degraded fleet
at unsustainable rates.

And Russia’s ability to replace or repair those aircraft is collapsing
alongside the fleet itself.

A November 2025 report by the Royal United Services Institute titled
“Vulnerabilities in Sukhoi Production” laid out the manufacturing crisis in detail.

Russia
produced just 9 Su-34s in 2022, rising to 13 in 2023, with a target of only 17 for 2025.

Su-35S
deliveries reached 10 out of 12 ordered in 2024.

As such, the annual production of Su-30, Su-34,
and Su-35 aircraft combined is around 20 aircraft per year.

Based on the cadence of Oryx reports,
that’s barely enough to offset confirmed combat losses, let alone the imputed losses accumulating
from overuse.

But the real problem is this: Russia’s increasing isolation.

Production
depends heavily on foreign machine tools, specialized electronics, and skilled engineers,
many of whom have emigrated.

Sanctions have disrupted access to the precision manufacturing
equipment that keeps production lines running: Japanese CNC machines from Sodick at one
critical facility were installed in 2017 and are guaranteed accurate for 10 years.

Russia
can no longer legally obtain replacements or spare parts for them.

The clock is already running out.

The defense industry crisis described by Defense Magazine in November 2025 goes deeper still.

Russian defense enterprises are operating in what internal documents describe as “manual control
mode” — a euphemism for companies managing debt crises by crisis rather than running sustainable
operations.

The United Aircraft Corporation, which oversees production of every Russian
combat aircraft from Su-35s to Tu-95 bombers, is entangled in hundreds of court cases from unpaid
contractors.

Defense contracts are being fulfilled at prices fixed in 2019 while component costs have
risen, in the words of internal correspondence, by “tens or even a hundred times.

” Companies
are taking guaranteed losses on every delivery.

Workforce mobilization for the war has drained
technical workers from production lines.

And the export market that historically subsidized
below-cost domestic deliveries to the likes of India, Egypt, Algeria, and Vietnam has nearly
vanished.

As a result, Russia’s arms exports collapsed by an estimated 92 percent between 2021
and 2024, according to the Jamestown Foundation.

Egypt cancelled its Su-35 contract.

India chose
the French Rafale over the Russian Su-57.

Even countries still nominally interested in Russian
aircraft are starting to second-guess the choice, since it’s become quite clear that Russia can’t
guarantee delivery timelines or spare parts.

The Su-57’s export prospects have all but
evaporated.

The Su-75 Checkmate light stealth fighter, supposedly Russia’s answer to the
F-35, has attracted essentially no buyers, with its most likely customer being Belarus
— hardly a premium market.

Then there’s the issue of China.

For two decades, China was
one of Russia’s best customers, purchasing Su-30MKK fighters and struggling to master jet
engine technology it didn’t yet have.

Today, China produces the J-20 fifth-generation stealth
fighter and the export-oriented J-35 and is actively marketing its fourth-generation fighters
abroad.

So far, only Pakistan has taken delivery of the J-10C, while countries like Iran, Egypt,
Indonesia, and the UAE have shown interest or explored potential deals.

For countries that once
turned to Moscow for affordable, capable jets, Beijing now offers the same value proposition,
all the while its supply chains are unaffected by Western sanctions.

Russia’s position as the
world’s affordable alternative to Western military aviation has been comprehensively undercut,
and with it, the export revenue that funded next-generation development.

Russia’s civilian
aviation industry reflects the same breakdown, and the two sectors are more intertwined than
they appear.

The United Aircraft Corporation governs both military fighter production
and civilian airliner production, meaning that management decisions, budget allocations, and
workforce assignments ripple across both.

In 2022, the Russian government announced a bold target
of more than 1,000 new civil aircraft for Russian airlines by 2030.

In the three years since,
Russian factories have produced thirteen civilian aircraft in total.

In 2025, Russia
delivered a single commercial aircraft out of 15 planned.

Production targets for 2024 and
2025 were slashed from 171 aircraft down to 21, and then cut again due to what officials described
as “financing challenges.

” The 1,000-by-2030 goal has since been quietly revised in the
Kremlin’s public agenda, with updated plans now targeting just under 1,000 domestically produced
aircraft as timelines slip under the weight of sanctions and production challenges.

Meanwhile,
Russia’s civilian fleet of over 700 aircraft, predominantly Airbus and Boeing models, is now
dependent on grey-market component sourcing, and Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service
has assessed that Russia could lose nearly 30 percent of its civilian aircraft by 2030 as
sanctions strangle the spare parts supply.

We’re already seeing some of that collapse start, such
as with the An-22 heavy-lift transport that broke in half and crashed near Moscow in December 2025,
killing seven people.

The plane was reportedly flying a year past its intended retirement
date.

This was likely the last An-22 in Russian service.

Here’s how it all adds up.

The leaked
maintenance report, the imputed loss projections, the production numbers, the export collapse, the
industrial debt crisis, the workforce shortage, and the civilian aviation breakdown.

Russia’s
fleet has managed to start losing a war, but not primarily due to its opponent.

Ukrainian pilots
aren’t better at launching more missions.

Instead, Russia is pushing every airplane well past its
breaking point, all in an attempt to close out the war that basically ground to a halt by the
end of its second year.

Russian President Vladimir Putin can’t hide this collapse indefinitely.

With each engine failure or downed aircraft, the losses will continue to accumulate, and
Ukraine’s intelligence services have become adept enough at spotting them to make sure they
get accounted for.

The only question now is how much of the fleet is left by the time the war
ends.