A drone strike by Safety Service of Ukraine (SBU) efficiently focused plane at Marinovka Airbase within the Volgograd area the evening of June 27,with satellite tv for pc imagery from June 29 confirming the destruction of two Russian Su-34 strike fighters and harm of two others. The assault was adopted two days later by an SBU strike onKirovske Airfield on the disputed Crimean Peninsula in a single day on June 28, which destroyed numerous helicopters together with a minimum of one Mi-28 assault helicopter. The Safety Service has intensified drone assaults on Russian airfields in June, and at was liable for launching Operation Spider’s Internet at first of the month, below which drone strikes destroyed a minimum of seven excessive worth Russian strategic bombers at airbases throughout a lot of the nation, together with unprecedentedly deep into Siberia over 4000km from Ukraine’s borders. The Su-34 has confronted higher losses than some other class of Russian fight jet within the Russian-Ukrainian Warfare, as a result of its position as a workhorse of the Aerospace Forces for assaults frontline positions and its higher publicity to menace.
Assaults on airfields housing Su-34s particularly are removed from unprecedented, and on June 13, 2024, a number of of the plane had been broken throughout a serious drone strike on the Morosovsk Airfield in Russia’s Rostov area, roughly 250 kilometres behind the frontlines. The Russian Defence Ministry obtained six batches of Su-34s in 2024, with trade having efficiently greater than doubled manufacturing of the plane to shut to 30 fighters per yr. At these manufacturing charges, the fleet anticipated to succeed in greater than 300 fighters by 2030 regardless of wartime losses. Relying on greenback trade charges, the fighter’s manufacturing prices are estimated at nicely below $15 million, which makes the alternative of losses extremely reasonably priced. Su-34s produced since 2024 have all been enhanced Su-34M variants, the primary orders for which had been positioned in 2020, together with new specialised digital assault variant and an intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance variants. In October 2023 then Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu noticed concerning that the Su-34 “is the primary workhorse” of the Aerospace Forces and had been flying sorties at a very excessive tempo.
The Su-34 is the heaviest and longest ranged fighter class on this planet in the present day, and has seen attrition charges lowered from 2023 with the combination of precision guided glide bombs to offer shut air assist, permitting the plane to assault their targets from safer distances. The numerous depletion of Ukraine’s personal lengthy vary air defences, regardless of intensive efforts by international locations throughout the Western world to replenish it, has additional contribute to their freedom of motion within the skies over the Donbas frontlines. Anew class of glide bomb for the fighter was unveiled in September 2024, and one other new class, the Drel cluster bomb, is anticipated to be built-in by the tip of 2025. The Su-34’s notably excessive weapons carrying capability additionally permits them to deploy the notably giant new FAB-3000 3000 kilogram glide bomb, in addition to a number of mixtures of lighter ordinance together with bombs with thermobaric warheads. Experiences from Ukrainian personnel on the frontlines have persistently indicated that assaults utilizing these sorts of ordinance have been devastating.
