In a story on the Ukraine - Russia front that was missed with everything going on in the Middle East, video has emerged of a Russian stealth 5th generation Su-57 fighter jet shooting down its own friendly partnered S-70 stealth drone at high altitude, after it lost control of the drone, to prevent technology from the drone falling into enemy hands. This occurred relatively deep inside Ukrainian territory, around the city of Kostiantynivka in the Donetsk Oblast. Videos emerged of some of the wreckage of the S-70 drone on the ground.

While it is obviously not good that Russia lost one of their handful of stealth partner drones, this incident reveals some key information and battlefield firsts. Russia, now with visual evidence, has become the first nation to deploy 5th generation stealth aircraft over highly contested enemy airspace. The stealth capabilities of the Su-57 are very real. It went undetected by Ukrainian air defence systems, including the US manufactured Patriot system, and the remaining Soviet/Russian S-300 systems Ukraine has, while over 20km inside Ukrainian airspace (when measured at the frontlines of the conflict, much further inside Ukraine if measured from 1991 borders) at high altitudes that these systems should have no issue covering. Western copium about the Su-57 not being a true 5th generation stealth aircraft, based off of images of outdated prototypes, has now been disproven by actual evidence.

This also really brings to the forefront two other realities: Ukraine’s air defence is very degraded, and Russian commanders are confident that the Su-57s stealth capabilities are enough to carry out deep strikes without being detected with regards the current state of Ukrainian air defence. I have already talked about the stealth one two punch that the Su-57 offers with its stealth cruise missiles in the Kh-69 before, and how this enables Russia to effectively extend the range of these cruise missiles and strike deep inside Ukrainian territory. The most obvious example of this has been the strikes against energy infrastructure using the Kh-69 cruise missile.

Editing to say: Key takeaways from this? Ukraine should be very glad that Russia only have a handful of Su-57 aircraft and S-70 drones, if they had the same amount of these aircraft as the USA has F-22s, the aerial campaign against Ukraine would look very different. Secondly, Iran should be worried about their air defence capabilities against stealth aircraft. The backbone of Iran’s air defence is the Russian S-300PMU2 system (NATO name: SA-20B), and locally produced variants of it. We already know that Israeli stealth aircraft in the US made F-35 can bypass the Syrian S-300PM (NATO name: SA-10B) air defence systems with some effort, but still with relative ease. With Iran currently having the most advanced S-300 systems, even more advanced than the S-300PMU (NATO name: SA-10C) systems Ukraine has, some might think that they would do better against stealth aircraft. But that is quite a gamble to take when a lot of the radar technology in the more advanced variant of the system Iran has is simply an evolution of older systems, systems which have now proven to be incapable of detecting both Russian and US made stealth aircraft. Iran ideally needs S-400 systems soon to adequately deter the stealth threat.