Ukraine Has Lost Half Its Warplanes

by DAVID AXE

A year of fighting has cost Ukraine a full half of its fighter jets, cargo planes and military helicopters. That’s the most startling finding of the 2015 edition of Flight’s annual report on the world’s air forces.

In early 2014, before Russian forces invaded Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and subsequently came to the aid of pro-Moscow separatists in eastern Ukraine, Kiev possessed 400 military aircraft, according to Flight.

A year later, that number has plummeted to just 222.

The Russians captured some aircraft. Others crashed. Rebels and Russians shot down many others. Potentially dozens of warplanes had lain around unused for years prior to the conflict and simply proved too decrepit to return to flight, finally compelling Kiev to remove them from its inventory.

Whatever the exact reasons, no other military—not even Syria’s or Iraq’s—has suffered such a precipitous decline in current conflicts.

Indeed, the 178 planes and copters that Ukraine has lost account for a third of the decrease in total world air power holdings over the past 12 months. Today the world’s governments boast a combined 51,685 military aircraft, down 459 from 2014.

For the record, 13,902 of those 51,685 airplanes and rotorcraft, or 27 percent, belong to the U.S. military. Russia has the second-largest aerial force with 3,429 military aircraft—seven percent of the world total.

Prior to the Russian invasion, Ukraine boasted—on paper, at least—a fairly powerful air force.

No longer. “The conflict has taken a heavy toll on Ukrainian forces,” Flight notes.

When Russian troops swept into Crimea in February last year, they overran a number of Ukrainian air bases and captured scores of aircraft, many of them in poor condition and unable to take off.

The Russians actually returned some of the planes they captured, includinga Beriev seaplane that Ukrainian officers promptly sent back into action. Some Ukrainian aircraft narrowly escaped advancing Russian troops under their own power. Kiev’s engineers also managed to disassemble, pack into crates and ship north other aircraft, including some MiG-29 fighters.

But the losses mounted. And as the war expanded to Ukraine’s east, Kiev’s pilots found themselves conducting air attacks against pro-Russian separatists armed with high-tech surface-to-air missiles—one of which destroyed a Malaysian airliner over Ukraine in July, killing 298 people.

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The rebels also took a toll on Ukraine’s air force, army aviation and naval air arm. After nearly a year of battle, Aviation International News tallied Kiev’s combat losses—at least 22 aircraft, and possibly many more. Twenty-one fell to surface-to-air missiles. A Russian MiG-29 fighter shot down oneUkrainian MiG-29 with a missile it reportedly fired from inside Russian air space.

“One Su-24, six Su-25s and two MiG-29s have been lost,” AIN reported. “The downed airlifters were an An-26, an An-30 and an Il-76. … The helicopters were five Mi-8/17s and five Mi-24s.”

It’s unclear exactly how many Ukrainian aircrew and passengers have died in the shoot-downs. We know for sure that 49 people perished when a separatist missile struck one of Kiev’s Il-76 transport planes.

Ukraine’s fighter force has suffered the worst. In early 2014, Flight counted 80 MiG-29s, 36 Su-27, 36 Su-25s and 24 Su-24s in Ukrainian service—although, to be fair, many of these planes were in disrepair. In any event, in 2015 just 19 MiG-29s, 16 Su-27s, 15 Su-25s and 11 Su-24s remain active, according to Flight.