A rare Sukhoi S-70 Okhotnik—the Russian air force’s first stealthy armed drone—got shot down apparently by an accompanying Russian fighter after the drone seemingly malfunctioned near the Ukrainian-held fortress town of Chasiv Yar in eastern Ukraine on Saturday.
The wreckage rained down on nearby Kostyantynivka. Imagery from the crash site offers a tantalizing hint at what the 65-foot-wingspan, subsonic S-70 was doing over the eastern front line.
Amid the scorched drone parts were apparent components of a D-30SN precision glide bomb. That strongly implies the Okhotnik was flying a bombing sortie when it was shot down.
Fighterbomber, the Russian air force’s unofficial Telegram channel, read that revelation as evidence the air force is flying a lot of S-70s over Ukraine. “Russia has begun to massively use heavy strike UAVs Inokhodets and Okhotnik in the special operations area,” the channel claimed. The Inokhodets is a non-stealthy, propeller-driven combat drone.
It’s clear the 26-foot-long Inokhodets are routinely flying sorties over Ukraine. The Ukrainians have shot down at least seven of the drones. It’s less clear the Okhotniks are making more than a token contribution to the Russian war effort.
Sukhoi first flew the satellite-guided Okhotnik in 2019 and dropped a bomb from the drone for the first time two years later. The company initially built just two prototype Okhotniks. Fighterbomber claimed the Okhotnik that got shot down over Ukraine was a production model, not a prototype, but it’s hard to verify that claim.
Given how slowly Sukhoi develops new warplane designs, it’s possible there were still just two Okhotniks in the Russian inventory before one of the drones fell to the ground on Saturday. More optimistically for the Russians, there were three: the two prototypes plus the first example from the initial serial production batch.
In any event, it’s evident the Russian air force intends to deploy the huge new drone as a glide bomber, lobbing precision-guided winged bombs at Ukrainian troops and civilians from 25 miles away or farther. At present, a hundred or so Sukhoi Su-34 bombers are the air force’s main glide bombers—and they stay busy dropping around 3,000 glide bombs every month.
But the Su-34 regiments have had a hard war. Ukrainian air defenses have shot down at least 29 of the two-person, supersonic bombers since Russia widened its war on Ukraine in February 2022. That’s a fifth of all the Su-34s Sukhoi has built.
Adding S-70s to the glide-bombing campaign would give the Su-34 regiments a break—and save the lives of hard-to-replace aircrew. But that’s easier said than done, as Saturday’s mishap proved. The U.S. Air Force, the leader in artificial intelligence for combat drones, is still years away from deploying a fully A.I. drone. The Russian air force is years behind that.
So the Okhotnik almost certainly still relies on a strong radio link to its operators sitting on the ground presumably somewhere in Russia. And that satellite-relayed link is vulnerable to the powerful radio jamming that complicates communications and navigation all along the 700-mile front line in Ukraine.
There’s a good chance the Russian air force shot down that Okhotnik near Chasiv Yar on Saturday after the drone lost its connection to its operators. A rogue drone might crash-land mostly intact behind enemy lines, essentially handing its technological secrets to the other side’s intelligence agencies. The Russians probably hoped that, by shooting down the drone, they would render it inscrutable to foreign analysts.
They failed, of course. Enough of the S-70 and its payload was intact for observers to identify the drone and the glide bomb it was carrying.
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