The Ukrainian Air Force’s Recon Crews Have A Dangerous Job, Flying Close To Russian Troops To Snap Photos

The Ukrainian air force had as few as 21, and as many as 25, Sukhoi Su-24M bombers and Su-24MR reconnaissance planes when Russian forces widened their war on Ukraine starting in the early morning hours of Feb. 24.

At least one Su-24MR remains. It and whatever other recon planes have survived Russian air-defenses probably are pretty busy right now, spotting targets for other forces to strike.

All the pre-war bombers and recon planes—as many as 16 of the former and nine of the latter—belonged to the 7th Bomber Regiment at Starokostiantyniv air base in western Ukraine.

In 10 months of hard flying and deadly combat, the regiment has written off at least 12 Su-24s. We know for sure the Russians shot down one Su-24MR and killed its two crew over Poltava Oblast in central Ukraine on Oct. 22. It’s unclear how many of the other 11 losses involved recon variants.

Luckily for the 7th Bomber Regiment, there were up to 47 old Su-24 airframes in storage across Ukraine, many of them at the aircraft boneyard in Bila Tserkva near Kyiv. Technicians have been fixing up these old jets in order to keep the 7th Bomber Regiment in the war.

After all the losses and all the additions to the flightline at Starokostiantyniv, the 7th Bomber Regiment still has at least one Su-24MR recon jet. It’s visible in the background of photos accompanying an interview with Col. Yevgeny Bogdanovich Bulatsyk, the regiment’s commander.

It’s possible, though not likely, that that single Su-24MR is the last recon plane in the Ukrainian air force, which began the wider war with around 125 jets and has lost 51 of them while adding a few others through foreign donations—or by repairing derelict airframes.

It’s likelier there are at least a few Su-24MRs left. In any event, they’re a precious resource for a country craving battlefield intelligence.

Sukhoi developed the Su-24MR in the mid-1970s as a replacement for aging Ilyushin Il-28R recon planes. The firm took the basic, two-seat Su-24M supersonic bomber, removed the gun and the attack avionics and replaced them with cameras, a side-looking radar and fixtures for an underbelly signals-intelligence pod.

The Su-24MR today is something of an anachronism. The U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy no longer operate tactical photo-reconnaissance jets, and instead use satellites and drones to image targets. It’s a dangerous job, after all—flying low over or near enemy territory in order to focus a downward-looking camera. Not every air arm is willing to risk pilots for a few photos.

But Ukraine possesses only a few large drones and entirely relies on its foreign allies, or commercial firms, for satellite imagery. The Su-24MR still is useful for a country with few alternatives.

Exactly how Ukrainian commanders use their recon jets isn’t totally clear. Maybe the Russian air force’s own Su-24MR operations offer clues. The Russians in February had around 50 of the recon planes. They’ve lost nine Su-24s since then—at least one of which was an Su-24MR.

Taking off from Smolensk in western Russia as well as from Russian-occupied Crimea, Russian Su-24MRs “extensively mapped” the Ukraine battlefield, Justin Bronk, Nick Reynolds and Jack Watling wrote in a new study for the Royal United Services Institute in London.

“The Ukrainian air force observed that the [Su-24MRs] constantly flew two-to-four sorties per day at medium-to-high altitude along Ukraine’s borders from early February to the end of April,” the analysts wrote. Medium or high flight lends range to the Su-24MR’s cameras and radar, helping crews to stay outside range of Ukrainian air-defenses.

The problem, for Ukrainian recon crews, is that Russia’s best air-defenses—its S-400 surface-to-air missiles—range farther than Ukraine’s own S-300s do: 155 miles versus 70 miles.

So it’s much harder for Ukrainian Su-24MR crews to photograph targets and stay safe from Russian missiles than it is for Russian Su-24MR crews to photograph targets and stay safe from Ukrainian missiles.

That could explain the steeper losses that the Ukrainian Su-24MR force apparently has suffered. Losses that, for as bad as they might be, haven’t yet driven the force into extinction.