A Russian Su-34 accidentally bombed a Russian city. Here’s what it tells us about Putin’s forces.

FT. LAUDERDALE, Fla. — On April 20 at 10:15 pm Moscow time, an explosion rocked the center of Belgorod, a Russian city just miles from the border with Ukraine.

In and of itself, that’s not an unusual occurrence — given the proximity to the border, shelling of the city is a regular event. According to a research project from the independent media outlet Novaya Gazeta Europe, published in early February, the area around Belgorod has suffered more death and destruction than any other Russian region since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

But something stood out in this case: the explosion came when a Russian Aerospace Forces (VKS) Sukhoi Su-34 medium-range fighter-bomber/strike aircraft accidentally ejected a weapon.

This weapon was somehow released in active/armed mode after being discharged from one of the Su-34 aircraft’s carriage stations. It detonated on one of the city’s central streets, leaving a 65-foot-wide crater, destroying several automobiles, damaging nearby buildings and injuring three people, according to Belgorod’s regional governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov, via a press release on his Telegram channel. The Russian MoD issued its own statement to the Russia news agency TASS, calling the incident a result of an “emergency release of an air ordnance,” but did not specify which weapon had been ejected.

On social media, pro-Ukrainian channels cheered and mocked the friendly fire incident. But while it would be easy to dismiss this as a one-off mistake, there is a lot to unpack about the incident which can shine a light on the state of Russia’s air forces, 15 months after the war began.

Dumb Bombs, Manufacturing Woes

It is likely the bomb that hit Belgorod was an older, non-precision “dumb” bomb. Despite the need for the aircraft to defend itself against interceptor aircraft launched by the Ukrainian Air Force (PSU), Su-34s are rarely seen with the Vympel R-73 (AA-11) infrared air-to-air missile on its launcher rails, which is part of the standard load-out for the aircraft. Photos of the SU-34 fleet taken in recent months did not show their standard complement of ALCMs or other stand-off munitions, instead revealing that the jets are carrying only unguided munitions.

Both what the aircraft is carrying and where it is flying serve as indicators of the state of the Russian munitions stockpile.

The Su-34 is built at the Novosibirsk Aviation Production Association (NAPO) and is one of the most expensive tactical aircraft in service. It is fitted with several costly on-board systems that support the standoff-range bombing/precision strike mission it is designed to perform. One of these is the Kaluga Scientific Research Institute for Radio-Electronic Technology (KNIRTI) L-175V Khibiny EW system. The aircraft was seen more recently carrying a version of the same KNIRTI design bureau’s SAP-518 jammer that now supplements the pair of L-175V pods.

The aircraft is a derivative of the original Su-27 high speed fighter-interceptor designed during the Cold War to be a counter to the Boeing F-15. It is heavier and larger than the other aircraft in the Sukhoi “family” and was designed to replace older-generation Su-24s and take over some of the missions formerly assigned to Naval Aviation unit Tupolev Tu-22M3 Backfire bombers.

Prior to the Ukraine war, the aircraft had demonstrated the use of its long-range weapons packages in Syria, and the effectiveness of the Su-34 in this role prompted Algeria to end years of back-and-forth negotiations and issue a request to purchase 12 units. The difficulty that the VKS have is the long release-range satellite-aided bombs and even longer-range cruise missiles that the aircraft is designed to carry are now in short supply.

Shortages of precision-guided munitions (PGM) in the Russian force are all traced back to the Russian industry’s extensive dependence on imported semiconductors, processing modules, signal amplifiers and a long list of other electronic components used in these weapons. These are now supposed to be denied to Russian industry by a new regime of US and EU export controls.

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Even before the Ukraine war had begun, the director of Ukraine’s largest defense electronics company told Breaking Defense that, should major sanctions be imposed, “Russian industry will have almost no capacity to manufacture the [Novator] Kalibr cruise missile. At least 70 percent of the components in the front-end/guidance and navigation section of the missile are imported. Where [is a] factory going to source these from if Russia invades and is subjected to a sanctions regime?”

In the months since the invasion, numerous unexploded weapons and captured equipment have been dissected and reverse-engineered by groups of Ukrainian investigators. Their findings were later examined by a team from the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies (RUSI) in London, which published a lengthy report and concluded there are at least 450 different models of unique foreign-made components found in the configuration of 27 different Russian weapon systems. Among the surprise discoveries was the majority of these components – at least 318 – were manufactured by US suppliers that were companies with a long history of designing and building sophisticated microelectronics devices for the US military.

A parallel effort by another UK organization, Conflict Aramaments Research (CAR), revealed that “Russian defence industry uses identical sets of components across different weapon systems.” A post-mortem of several major guided weapon systems – the 3M14 variant of the Kalibr, the 9M544 “smart” artillery rocket and the Raduga Kh-59 and Kh-101 ALCMs that are launched from the Su-34 – reveals that these weapons all use the same set of foreign, imported components.

Specifically, these are circuit boards used in the satellite navigation signal receiver blocks in the navigation and guidance systems of all four weapons. These and other components discovered by these teams of investigators, reads one CAR report, showcases “the centrality of foreign technology to Russian advanced defence equipment” and why these weapons are being seen less and less as the conflict continues.

High Loss Rates

The Su-34 was designed to hit targets as far away as 600 miles by employing the ALCMs described above and a full assortment of other PGMs. The standard mission profile is roughly analogous to that of the current Boeing F-15E Strike Eagle or how the (now-retired) General Dynamics F-111 was employed during 1991’s Operation Desert Storm.

But according to several Russian sources, PGM procurement dropped off more than a decade ago. One factor was the high price tag associated with these weapons. The Kh-101 that has been fired against Ukraine in large numbers, by way of example, is estimated to cost the VKS roughly US $13 million per missile.

After the March 2014 seizure of Crimea and the later invasion of the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine, there was an initial sanctions regime put in place blocking the importation of these components plus many others required to manufacture these missiles. By the time of the Ukraine war eight years later, choking off the importation of these components had an adverse impact on production rates for these long-range weapons and put them in short supply.

The use of these weapons in the Ukraine war further depleted their availability, to the point where the Su-34, designed to launch missiles from hundreds of miles away and at several miles up, has been forced into missions that require it to fly at low altitudes and drop “dumb” ordnance from almost directly above their targets – and within range of Ukrainian air defense units.

“Assigning these Su-34 crews to fly these missions that they were never properly trained for produces accidents like this which occurred in Belgorod,” said a retired Russia aircraft designer who spoke to Breaking Defense. “If there are these unintended discharges of ordnance the only comment you can make is that ‘it is a miracle it is not happening every day.’

“Plus, it is a colossal misuse of resources and mismatch of platform capability in comparison to the mission requirement,” he explained. “Using the Su-34 to drop unguided bombs is like pressing a Rolls-Royce automobile into being used as a taxicab.”

Given that it was designed for a different mission set, why use the SU-34 for this kind of operation at all? The SU-25, which is normally tasked with low-altitude bombing, has been shot down in fairly large numbers. In theory, the Su-34 is the more survivable option thanks to its enhanced EW system. And secondly, Russia may not have that many options.

But the lack of preparation and low-altitude mission profile makes the Su-34 a highly vulnerable target. It puts the aircraft within the interception envelope of short-range Man-Portable Air Defence Systems (MANPADS) such as the US-made Stinger, the Polish Grom, some of the later model Russian hand-held missiles and even mobile anti-aircraft guns like the German-made Gepard self-propelled air defence system. One Su-34 lost on March 3 was even reported to have been shot down by one of Russia’s own Almaz-Antei S-300 batteries in a friendly fire incident, although other sources have credited the kill to a Ukrainian air defense unit.

The General Staff of Ukraine’s Armed Forces have reported Russia has lost 301 fixed-wing and rotary-wing aircraft since the Feb. 24 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Of those losses, 19 are visually confirmed to have been Su-34s, and this does not count the numbers lost in other non-BVR engagements plus aircraft lost due to training accidents.

In 19 years, Russia has only produced 143 production-series aircraft, and pre-war they were producing the jets at roughly one aircraft per month. That means losses to the Su-34 fleet are nearing the equivalent of two-years worth of production and it may not ever be replaced in adequate numbers – again due to sanctions on foreign technology and microelectronics.

But another cause for the problems of these losses was reported April 28 in the London Daily Telegraph’s Ukraine War roundtable podcast. They report overall capacity of the Russian military to use its military hardware effectively is significantly compromised.

Russian airpower seems to be worst-case of all with one Telegraph reporter explaining he had been given a “briefing on the Russian Air Force and I had not realized how limited they are. I mean, they have fantastic amounts of top-line jets, but they essentially only carry out attacks in onesies and twosies, and they cannot coordinate more than that.”

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“They may have lots and lots of these onesies and twosies [sorties], but they are just launching out, doing something and coming back. There is also a reticence in the Russian Air Force to actually get up [into the airsspace] over Ukraine and fight because they know their chances of being shot down are very high, especially now that the Patriots are there. I do not know what the exact operating orders for these Patriot crews are going to be, but with a 150 km range, Russian aeroplanes can now be taken out quite far away.”

Reports from the earliest days of the war pointed out that this almost slipshod use of airpower is at least partially due the Russians lacking any serious numbers of battle management assets. What multiple intelligence and information inputs the Russians had were thus not effectively integrated into operational planning.

The damage caused by a drone attack earlier this year on one of the VKS Beriev A-50 aircraft (Russia’s analogue to the US Boeing E-3 AWACS) based in Belarus highlighted that there are only a small number of these platforms in Russian inventory and even those have been put to very limited use. The same lack of imported components both prohibits any additional units being built, as well as the ability to modernize any of the older models.

Meanwhile, Belgorod and other cities in Russia close to Ukraine are bracing for the imminent Ukraine counteroffensive. The only question they are asking is the next time there is an explosion nearby is if it “will be one of theirs or one of ours.”