Ukraine is pushing Russia back in one absolutely crucial area
The Russian air force went to war in Ukraine with just nine of its most important aircraft: its hulking Beriev A-50 radar planes. Now it’s down to six A-50s – and these losses could have a profound impact on the course of the wider war.
A Russian Beriev A-50 airborne radar aircraft. Ukraine has managed to destroy several of these important planes, significantly reducing the strength of Russia's small operational fleet -
That’s because the Russians, after a very slow start, are attempting to bring to bear their overwhelming advantage over the Ukrainians when it comes to supersonic fighters. The Ukrainian air force is doing its best to shoot down the speedy warplanes, but it’s easier – and much faster – to blind them, instead.
The four-engined A-50s with their massive, top-mounted radars are the fighter-bombers’ eyes, and the Ukrainians are poking them out one by one.
The A-50, a highly specialized modification of the Ilyushin Il-76 airlifter, is what air forces call an “airborne early warning” plane. That is, a flying radar station. The US Air Force introduced its iconic Boeing E-3 airborne early warning and control system, or AWACS, in the 1970s. These radar-equipped 707 airliners, much upgraded, are still flying today.
Putting long-range radars on planes isn’t done just for fun. A radar up in the sky at 30,000 feet or more has line of sight to the horizon hundreds of miles away. It can detect even the lowest-flying aircraft anywhere inside that radius. A mast-mounted radar down on the surface, by contrast, is unlikely to have a horizon much further off than thirty miles or so: anything beyond that distance will be able to “fly below the radar”, hiding below the horizon and avoiding detection.
Impressed with the E-3’s ability to detect enemy aircraft and missiles from hundreds of miles away, the Soviet air force developed its own version of the plane. The A-50 first flew in the 1980s. As many as forty of the big planes were built, but the relatively cash-strapped modern Russian forces were only able to maintain and modernise a handful of them over the years. As the 2020s arrived, just nine upgraded A-50M/Us were available as the Russian air force’s eyes in the sky.
The Russians put the planes to good use over Ukraine as they widened their war on the country starting in February 2022. Grouped into “orbits” of three planes, the A-50 force could maintain an almost constant presence in northern, eastern and southern Ukraine.
Crewed by up to 15 people including highly-trained sensor-operators and so-called “battle-managers” who coordinate other forces, the A-50s detected Ukrainian aircraft and missiles and vectored Russian aircraft and missiles to intercept.
The A-50s were instrumental in the Russian air force’s early victories against the Ukrainian air force. While Russia’s ground-based radars were important, the high-flying A-50s, patrolling 50 or a hundred miles behind the front line, provided “higher-resolution early warning and vector information on low-flying Ukrainian aircraft,” according to the Royal United Services Institute.
With this information, the Russians shot down dozens of Ukrainian planes. So it should come as no surprise that, as soon as they had the weapons to do so, the Ukrainians began hunting the A-50s.
Kyiv’s forces scored their first hit on an A-50 in February 2023, when they flew an explosives-laden drone to an air base in Belarus, landed it on top of a parked A-50 and triggered its payload. The resulting blast wrecked the $300-million radar plane, reducing the A-50 fleet to eight.
Nearly a year later on Jan. 14, the Ukrainians struck again. They fired a surface-to-air missile – possibly a US-made Patriot – at an A-50 flying over the Sea of Azov around 90 miles from the front line. The radar plane went down in flames with 15 experienced crew aboard.
That shoot-down spooked the Russian air force and compelled it to pull back its surviving A-50s. The Patriot is the longest-range surface-to-air missile that Ukraine admits to possessing, and it ranges just 90 miles. So the A-50s should have been safe on their new stations, 120 miles from the front line.
They weren’t. On Feb. 23, another A-50 went down near the Sea of Azov, reportedly with 10 people aboard. It’s pretty clear the Ukrainians didn’t use a Patriot to shoot it down. It’s possible they instead fired a missile from an old, Soviet-vintage S-200 long-range SAM battery pulled out of long-term storage.
In any event, after that third hit on an A-50, the Russian air force was almost certainly down to no more than six A-50s. In fact, the number of fully-upgraded A-50s that are in good repair with working equipment and safe to fly might be even lower.
Russian industry no longer builds A-50s. It does build a new radar plane called the A-100, but the single copy of that model has been in testing for years – and it may never enter front-line service. In damaging or destroying three A-50s, the Ukrainians may have permanently reduced – by at least a third – the Russians’ best aerial sensors.
That the Kremlin is worried is an understatement. “The intensity of the A-50 aircraft’s use has decreased,” Ukrainian air force spokesman Yurii Ihnat said on Tuesday. “They have been gone for several days.”
It’s possible the Russians are rethinking where, when and how they deploy their surviving A-50s. It’s equally possible they’re grounding whatever A-50s remain – and saving them for the next war.
This is very good news for the battered Ukrainian air force, which has lost most of its pre-war jets and is working hard to rebuild itself by fixing up old ex-Soviet jets and also acquiring dozens of surplus Lockheed Martin F-16s from Nato countries.
Even with the coming F-16s, the Ukrainian air force is badly outnumbered in the air. The Ukrainians might be able to deploy 150 fighters this year. Even after suffering heavy losses, the Russians can still deploy several times as many jets.
But in an aerial battle, if one side is backed by AWACS planes and the other is not, the AWACS-equipped side has a big advantage. The radar planes mean that their side’s fighters know where the enemies are without needing to use their own radars. Even if the enemy fighters light up their own radars, making themselves much more easily detected, a fighter radar – being intended primarily for targeting – only scans a cone of sky ahead of the plane. It isn’t a good tool for scanning the whole sky.
Ground radars can of course be used instead, but as we’ve seen they have limited range against low flying adversaries. They are also easily targeted by air strikes or radar-homing missiles, especially if they are near enough to enemy lines to be useful.
Of course, the Ukrainians have no radar planes. But US and allied aircraft regularly fly in international airspace over the Black Sea, despite occasional Russian threats. Much of Russian-occupied Ukraine lies within the radar and electronic-warfare footprint of such flights, and F-16s are often fitted with data-links allowing them to receive information from Nato assets.
Increasingly, the Russians are flying blind. They once depended on their A-50s to alert them to Ukrainian aircraft and missiles. Now the fighter pilots depend on their own radars as well as on a shrinking number of ground-based radars that the Ukrainians have also been targeting.
A blind pilot is a vulnerable pilot. Note that, as A-50s began falling from the sky, Russian Sukhoi Su-34 and Sukhoi Su-35 fighters also began falling, too. This month alone, the Ukrainians claimed they shot down nine Sukhois.
If the Ukrainians can push the Russian A-50s back even further, or even keep them grounded, they may achieve a position where their jets can operate effectively above the battle front. So far, neither side has achieved this, which has been a big factor in establishing the grinding, almost World War I nature of the ground fight.
US-led air forces in the Iraq and Libya wars, by contrast, were able to shatter Soviet-equipped tank and artillery armies from above and end the high-intensity phases of those wars very quickly.
The tide may just be starting to turn.
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