15 planes were lost in a month: V. Putin rates military aviation with the highest score

“Military aviation, which today carries out very serious, very necessary tasks for us on the battlefield, is truly worthy of the highest appreciation and respect,” Putin said.

He emphasized that he pays a lot of attention to the war in Ukraine in his work. “Both for me and for you, I think, all the brightest, most significant things [2023 m.] took place on the battlefield, in the special zone of military operations”, V. Putin added.

Before that, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stated that Kyiv had shot down 15 Russian warplanes since the beginning of February. Only in the last days of February and the beginning of March, Ukrainian forces destroyed seven planes. Among them are the modern fighter-bombers Su-35 and Su-34, as well as the “flying radar” A-50, which was shot down over the Sea of ​​Azov.

The results of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in destroying Russian military aircraft in February significantly exceeded the indicators of the previous months of the war. This shows that “Ukraine has become more aggressive, risking the use of Patriot launchers near the front line to attack Russian aircraft,” Justin Bronk, senior researcher at the London-based think tank RUSI, said in a BBC commentary.

The Patriot launchers might have been handed over to mobile air defense groups that would intercept Russian aircraft with 145 km range PAC-2 surface-to-air missiles, then quickly reposition to avoid a counterattack, US Forbes wrote.

“The recent relatively high losses of Russian aircraft appear to have led to a significant reduction in Russian aviation activity in eastern Ukraine, although it is unclear how long this reduction will last,” analysts at the US-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW) noted.

In total, according to ISW, from 2022 February. Russia lost 342 aircraft and 325 helicopters following the start of the full-scale invasion. At the same time, as noted by Forbes, the Russian military industry is capable of producing only a few dozen combat aircraft per year. The Russian Ministry of Defense has not officially confirmed the number of losses.