#центр подготовки летчиков-испытателей ввс в ахтубинске

[tomorrowusa]

The Sukhoi Su-57 is Russia's most advanced stealth fighter jet. Only about two dozen are operational. It is known that Russia has used these jets to launch Kalibr missiles into Ukraine.

So Ukraine became the first country ever to destroy a Su-57 – and there's reason to believe that it may have taken out TWO of them.

It’s increasingly clear a Ukrainian drone badly damaged, and possibly destroyed, a Russian air force Sukhoi Su-57 stealth fighter in a Saturday raid on Russia's Akhtubinsk State Flight Test Center in southern Russia 365 miles from the Russia-Ukraine border. And it’s possible a second Su-57—out of around two dozen Su-57s the Russian air force has acquired since the type’s first flight in 2010—was also damaged in the raid. “There is preliminary information that there could be two Su-57 aircraft affected,” Andriy Yusov, a spokesman for the Ukrainian intelligence agency, said in a Sunday interview.

The Su-57 is roughly the equivalent of the US F-22.

As recently as 2019, there were at least six twin-engine, supersonic Su-57s at Akhtubinsk. Ground crews routinely parked the radar-evading jets out in the open—eliciting a bitter protest from the Fighterbomber Telegram channel, a popular forum for Russian airmen and their boosters. Fighterbomber asked why, 28 months into Russia’s wider war on Ukraine, the air force hasn’t built hardened shelters for its most precious aircraft—including the Su-57 that Fighterbomber itself confirmed suffered shrapnel damage during the Saturday drone raid.

You read that correctly. These very expensive and relatively rare planes were parked outside in the open during wartime when Ukrainian drones have already struck more than twice the distance into Russia of the Akhtubinsk air base. The Russian military continues to prove that it simply is not very bright.

Meanwhile, Ukraine gets increasingly resourceful and innovative.

But the Ukrainians strike Russian airfields more effectively than the Russians strike Ukrainian airfields—thanks in large part to Ukraine’s growing inventory of long-range strike drones and the relative sluggishness of Russian decision-making. Ukrainian air force commanders frequently, sometimes more than once a day, scatter their jets across a vast network of small airfields and even highway airstrips—all in a preemptive effort to complicate Russian raids on parked planes. Russian air force commanders do no such thing. When Russian jets change bases, it’s usually the result of a long-planned move—often in response to particular bases repeatedly coming under attack by Ukrainian rockets or drones.

Here are before and after satellite photos of one of the wrecked Russian Su-57s.

^^^ Date format is DD/MM/YYYY. The Ukrainian captions simply identify the aircraft and point out burn marks and debris from the explosion. You don't have to annihilate an expensive aircraft to make it unusable.

Russian disinformation, as parroted by both extreme right and extreme left in Europe, often goes like this...

"OMG, there's no way Ukraine can ever defeat Russia with its unlimited resources."

We know that those "unlimited" resources are unable to provide almost a quarter of Russia's rural population with toilets. 🚽

Those Putin stooges want you to ignore how Russia has suffered frequent military humiliations, demonstrated bizarre military incompetence, and has lost hundreds of thousands of troops in the past 28 months. Russia, or rather its predecessor the USSR, lost the 1979-1989 Afghan invasion. Russian incompetence certainly did not vanish 35 years ago when that war ended.