Ukraine’s Pilots Are Flying Into Battle With Old, Dumb Missiles. It’s One Reason They Get Shot Down.

The Ukrainian air force began the current war at a serious disadvantage compared to the Russian air force. Fewer and older planes, more vulnerable bases, vexing pilot shortages.

One mismatch in particular has stood out—and has helped to define the ongoing aerial campaign as the war enters its third month. Russia has fire-and-forget air-to-air missiles. Ukraine’s own, older missiles require constant guidance—and put fighter pilots at greater risk.

The disparity is bad enough that, in one of its direct appeals to foreign supporters, the Ukrainian air arm practically begged for better, “smarter” missiles.

In a video the air arm circulated on social media on April 26, Col. Yuri Bulavka, an Su-27 pilot, pleaded for American-made F-15, F-16 or F-18 fighters to help him and his fellow aviators match the latest Russian Su-30 and Su-35 fighters.

“After all, these aircraft have powerful airborne radars, technological equipment and, most importantly, missiles with active homing heads,” Bulavka said.

So far, however, donor states have prioritized fresh supplies of spare parts over new planes with active missiles. A batch of parts that a NATO country—likely Poland, Bulgaria or Slovakia—recently shipped to Ukraine helped the Ukrainians to repair 20 grounded jets, most likely MiG-29 fighters.

With those fixed-up MiGs, Kyiv’s air force actually had more “operable” warplanes on April 19 than it did just two weeks prior, according to U.S. Defense Department spokesman John Kirby.

Still, the Ukrainian air force is down to around half its pre-war strength of around 125 fixed-wing fighters, attack jets and bombers. Squadrons flying around a dozen each Su-25 attack jets and Su-24 bombers appear to have disintegrated following heavy losses early in the war.

The six or so squadrons, together flying three dozen heavy Su-27s and 50 or so lighter MiG-29s, apparently are still active. By late March, however, the Ukrainians were flying no more than 10 sorties a day, versus the hundreds that the much larger Russian air force could fly every day even after losing dozens of jets to Ukrainian defenses.

Pentagon officials, and occasional video evidence on social media, confirm that the Ukrainian air force is still in the fight. But it’s apparent that the MiGs and Sukhois mostly are flying defensive patrols over northern and western Ukraine while avoiding offensive operations over the active battlegrounds in the east and south.

Kyiv’s pilots protect cities the Ukrainians already control. But they’re not actively assisting in the bloody effort to liberate cities, such as Kherson in the south, that the Russians have captured.

The front lines teem with enemy ground-based air-defenses, of course—air-defenses the Ukrainians with their outdated electronic jammers aren’t necessarily well-equipped to defeat. But the air-to-air missile mismatch is another reason the pilots of Ukraine’s 1980s-vintage MiGs and Sukhois don’t often risk flying near Russian forces.

That’s because Russian jets can lob air-to-air missiles at enemy planes 60 miles away or farther and then immediately turn away. That lets Russian pilots shoot toward the front without venturing near the front, thus exposing themselves to danger.

Ukrainian pilots can’t do that. After shooting their air-to-air missiles, they have to keep flying behind the missiles, toward the enemy and the enemy’s supporting surface-to-air batteries. To fight along the front, the Ukrainians can’t help but wind up within range of ground-based air-defenses.

Technology makes all the difference. The Russian air force’s standard air-to-air missile is the R-77, a 400-pound munition with a range of 60 miles or more plus an active seeker.

That is, the R-77 has a tiny radar in its nose. Before launching an R-77, a pilot locks the missile onto a target—in essence, telling it which blip on the jet’s radar screen to go after. He squeezes the trigger and launches the missile—and his job is done. The missile’s own radar scans the sky for its designated target and steers toward it. No assistance necessary.

The Ukrainians don’t have the R-77—and, absent new jets, couldn’t use it even if they did have it. Instead, they use the older R-27, which is manufactured in Ukraine at an Soviet-era factory in Kyiv and is the best munition that’s compatible with old-model MiGs and Sukhois.

The 550-pound R-27 comes in several models, but the R-27ER and R-27ET are the most important. When a Ukrainian Su-27 pilot dodging Russian bombardment briefly landed in Romania on the first full day of fighting on Feb. 24, his jet was packing two each ERs and ETs plus a pair of short-range infrared R-73s.

The ET has an infrared seeker, which can cut its effective range in half. The ER has a semi-active radar seeker that works at the missile’s maximum range of 60 miles or even farther.

The catch is that the radar isn’t in the missile. Instead, the missile has a passive radar receiver—an antenna that detects energy from the launching fighter and reflecting off the target. If the launching pilot switches off his radar or even turns his jet’s nose away from the enemy, the missile loses the signal … and drifts off-target.

An R-27 flies at four times the speed of sound. But in the time it takes an R-27 to arrive at its target—say, a couple of minutes—the launching fighter has closed from a maximum of 60 miles from its target to as few as 45 miles. And the shooter flew straight and level the entire time.

Worse, a fighter radar, switched on, is “a hand-held lamp [in] a darkened stadium,” to quote Tom Cooper, an author and expert on the Russian air force. Sure, you can see what you’re illuminating. But the enemy, meanwhile, can locate you by following your light.

All that is to say, an air force shooting semi-active missiles is at a big disadvantage compared to an air force firing active missiles.

Russian and Ukrainian jets clashed more frequently in the heady early days of the war as Russian forces advanced along three fronts—down to two today. It’s not clear how many pilots on each side got shot down in air-to-air combat or by ground forces while engaged in air-to-air combat.

But it’s worth noting that Ukraine with just 125 jets, pre-war, has lost no fewer than 16 of them. Russia has deployed hundreds of warplanes for the Ukraine campaign and has lost at least 24 of them. Proportionally, Kyiv’s fixed-wing losses probably are higher.

Ukrainian pilots have tried to mitigate the missile gap by altogether eschewing radar-guided R-27ERs and firing infrared R-27ETs, instead. But there’s a problem, Cooper pointed out.

The R-27ET’s seeker head “is dated … and has a relatively short acquisition range,” Cooper wrote. “Several [Ukrainian] MiGs and Sukhois have been shot down by Russian interceptors while trying to cut the range and deploy their R-27ETs.”

Even with inadequate weapons, Kyiv’s pilots have proved surprisingly resilient against overwhelming odds. And fighting defensively, under the umbrella of friendly SAMs, eases their missile disadvantage. But they’d prefer to fight offensively, with active munitions.

Despite the Ukrainians’ pleas, however, the United States and its NATO allies have no immediate plan—that they’ll admit to—to supply Ukraine with new fighters that are compatible with fire-and-forget missiles.

“This is an air force that relies principally on old Soviet aircraft, that’s what they’re used to flying, that’s what they’ve got in their fleet,” an unnamed Pentagon official told reporters on Thursday. “That’s what we’re trying to help them keep in the air.”