Russia’s Celebration Over Hitting Ukraine’s ‘Su-25 Jet’ Proves Short Lived

Russian military bloggers boasted Thursday that Moscow’s forces destroyed a Ukrainian air force Sukhoi Su-25 attack jet in southern Ukraine, but the aircraft was likely a decoy, some war observers have assessed.

Russian Telegram channel Dneprovsky Rubezh, and other accounts, published a video that allegedly captured a Russian “Lancet” suicide drone strike on what looks like a Ukrainian Sukhoi Su-25 at the Dolgintsevo airfield near Kryvyi Rih in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. However, some observers said the footage contains many signs that indicate that the destroyed “jet” was a decoy.

Ukraine’s military has used decoys throughout the war to lure Russian forces to waste their resources into destroying them. Ukraine’s largest steelmaker Metinvest told the Financial Times in September that the firm had supplied more than 250 sophisticated decoy weapons and pieces of equipment to Ukrainian troops across the frontline.

Decoys of weapons and equipment including tanks and U.S.-supplied High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) are also being produced for Kyiv’s military by other organizations and military units, the newspaper reported.

Newsweek has reached out to the Russian Defense Ministry for comment via email.

Russian publication Lenta reported Friday that the footage shows a drone striking a Ukrainian Su-25 jet, causing an explosion.

Telegram channel Military Informant, which posts updates about the Ukraine war and has more than 600,000 subscribers, said that “there is reason to believe that the Su-25 destroyed by the Lancet turned out to be a decoy.”

“This is evidenced by the atypical connection of the wings with the engines, the lack of mechanization of the wings and the crookedly made cockpit canopy,” the channel said in a post late Thursday.

Metinvest’s enterprise chief, who spoke to the Financial Times on the condition of anonymity for security reasons, said their success is measured by the decoys’ destruction.

“When they are destroyed, it means we have saved our guns and our guys’ lives—and the enemy has wasted more of its valuable weapons,” the enterprise chief said. “When they sit for too long we know we need to change the design.”

Ukrainian artillery soldiers participating in Kyiv’s counteroffensive told Reuters in late June that Russia’s Lancet drones were one of the key threats from Moscow after its military recently ramped up their use.

The drones are believed to have a price tag of around $35,000, making them much more cost-effective than missiles in the war, Newsweek previously reported.

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