Ukraine's Armed Forces shot down 10 Russian military aircraft between 17 and 27 February, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence has announced. Among them are nine modern Su-35 and Su-34 aircraft, as well as an A-50 "flying radar".
The day before, the ministry reported the downing of a Su-34 supersonic fighter-bomber in the eastern direction. "Oops, we did it again! <...> And now it's 10 destroyed Russian aircraft in 10 days!" the ministry concluded.
On the same day, the commander of the Ukrainian Air Force, Lieutenant General Mykola Oleshchuk, said that his men had shot down another Su-34 in the same direction. As proof, he provided the silhouette of a burning aircraft on a thermal imaging screen.
Prior to that, telegram channels reported that a Russian Su-34 was shot down on Friday 23 February. The fighter jet went down in the Henichesk district of Kherson region, Krymsky Viter wrote. The southern Ukrainian defence forces stressed that the fate of the aircraft was being investigated.
According to The Moscow Times, the Fighterbomber telegram channel called this information fake, but noted that recently "real **** [horror] has been happening in the sky" as the Ukrainian Armed Forces have been launching SAM strikes against Russian attack aircraft and "deliberately piling on missiles of all types, both in the air and on the ground, just hoping for a result."
"The crews are manoeuvring, turning deeper into our territory, and then our air defence wakes up and starts e****ing [hitting] both. All of them. And the fight for life begins in the cockpit," he admitted.
Another serious loss of Russian military aviation was the A-50 long-range radar detection and control aircraft. It was shot down near the Sea of Azov on 23 February. Ukrainian media sources reported that it was a joint operation of the country's air force and military intelligence. The downing of the aircraft was confirmed by Russian military commanders, but they claimed that it was shot down by Russian air defence forces by mistake.
On 21 February, the Ukrainian Armed Forces announced another downing of a Su-34. And on 19 February, it became known that two aircraft had been downed at once: Su-35 and Su-34. This was announced personally by the head of the Armed Forces, Oleksandr Syrskyi.
On 18 February, Oleshchuk wrote that Russia had lost another Su-34. On 17 February, he also said that air defence systems had shot down two Su-34s and one Su-35.
Meanwhile, the Ukrainian Armed Forces' figures are sharply higher than in previous months. This suggests that "Ukraine has become more aggressive, risking the use of Patriot launchers near the front line to hit Russian aircraft," Justin Bronk, a senior fellow at the London-based RUSI think tank, told the BBC.
The same version is shared by the American Forbes. The publication notes that the Patriot launchers could have been transferred to mobile air defence groups, which would ambush Russian aircraft with 145km-range PAC-2 surface-to-air missiles and then quickly change their location to avoid a counterattack.