Ukrainian drone strikes on Saki Air Base in occupied Crimea are blowing the blast doors off Russia’s reinforced aircraft shelters. But beyond physical airfield damage lies a second, far more devastating campaign: Western sanctions, critical component shortages, and collapsing arms export revenues are choking Russia’s defense-industrial base, making it nearly impossible to replace lost fighter jets like the Su-57 and Su-34.
⏱️ CHAPTERS:
00:00 - Ukrainian Drone Strike Hits Saki Air Base in Crimea
01:25 - Satellite Imagery Shows 6 Damaged Russian Hardened Aircraft Shelters
02:45 - Ukrainian Drone Strikes Target Russian Aircraft Sortie Generation
04:15 - Ukraine Parallel Operations Strategy Overloads Russian Air Defenses
05:40 - Oryx Confirms 185 Russian Aircraft Lost in Ukraine
07:10 - Su-57 Stealth Fighter Production Collapses to Zero Deliveries
08:40 - Rostec Profit Drops 42 Percent as Arms Exports Collapse
10:10 - Can Russia Replace Its Destroyed Fighter Jets in Ukraine?
Support us directly as we bring you independent, up-to-date reporting on military news and global conflicts by clicking here: https://www.youtube.com/@TheMilitaryShow/join
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SOURCES: https://pastebin.com/PrAC0m1a
⏱️ CHAPTERS:
00:00 - Ukrainian Drone Strike Hits Saki Air Base in Crimea
01:25 - Satellite Imagery Shows 6 Damaged Russian Hardened Aircraft Shelters
02:45 - Ukrainian Drone Strikes Target Russian Aircraft Sortie Generation
04:15 - Ukraine Parallel Operations Strategy Overloads Russian Air Defenses
05:40 - Oryx Confirms 185 Russian Aircraft Lost in Ukraine
07:10 - Su-57 Stealth Fighter Production Collapses to Zero Deliveries
08:40 - Rostec Profit Drops 42 Percent as Arms Exports Collapse
10:10 - Can Russia Replace Its Destroyed Fighter Jets in Ukraine?
Support us directly as we bring you independent, up-to-date reporting on military news and global conflicts by clicking here: https://www.youtube.com/@TheMilitaryShow/join
#militarystrategy #militarydevelopments #militaryanalysis
#themilitaryshow
SOURCES: https://pastebin.com/PrAC0m1a
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NewsTranscript
00:00At the beginning of July 2026, Ukrainian drones found six of the seven hardened aircraft
00:06shelters at Saki Air Base in occupied Crimea. They blew the doors of four of them. And that
00:12same base had already been hit once just days before. Russia had spent real money reinforcing
00:18that airfield with concrete shelters built specifically to stop this kind of strike.
00:23Within a single week, Ukraine ran the experiment twice and got through both times. Every outlet
00:29covering the war ran some version of that story. But we want to make the case today that the hangar
00:34fire is the least interesting part of what's actually happening to Russian air power right now.
00:40Because underneath the footage of collapsing sheltered doors is a second campaign that gets
00:45almost no coverage at all. One being fought in export ledgers, sanctioned lists and corporate
00:51earnings statements. And that second campaign may end up mattering more than any single strike.
00:57Ukraine isn't just destroying Russian jets one at a time on a taxiway in Crimea.
01:02It's making it structurally harder for Russia to ever build the next one.
01:06So let's get into it, starting with setting the scene.
01:10Saki, more properly Novo Fedorivka Air Base, has been home to the Russian Navy's 43rd
01:16Independent Naval Attack Aviation Regiment since the annexation of Crimea in 2014.
01:22It's been used to deploy Su-30SM and Su-30M multirole fighters, aircraft used for naval strike
01:29missions. But it's also been increasingly used for glide bomb runs against southern Ukraine.
01:34For most of the war, it functioned as a relatively secure rear base, far enough from the front line
01:40that Russia treated it as a safe place to park, service and rearm aircraft. But in July 2026,
01:46Ukraine's security service, the SBU, started launching drone strikes against the base's
01:52hangar infrastructure and reported five confirmed hits, with preliminary information placing Su-30
01:58and Su-30SM fighters inside two of the targeted hangars, and a fire breaking out where one of
02:03those aircraft was stored. The SBU's own valuation put each of those aircraft at somewhere between
02:0930 and 50 million dollars, depending on configuration. Two days later, the SBU struck again, this time
02:16claiming hits on seven hangars across the base, with Su-30SM, Su-30 and Su-24 aircraft reportedly
02:23inside several of them. The SBU claimed at least seven aircraft were destroyed or damaged.
02:29Apart from Saki, Ukraine also hit the Guardyskoye Air Base, roughly 30 kilometers inland,
02:36striking two more hangars, storing Shaheed drones and aviation support equipment.
02:41What makes these strikes different from most of the airfield hits we've covered over the past years,
02:46is that we don't have to rely on Ukrainian government claims alone to know what happened.
02:51Satellite imagery from Vantor, a commercial satellite company, independently confirmed the damage.
02:57Six of the seven hardened aircraft shelters showed visible damage. The blast doors on four of them were
03:02no longer attached, but lying out on the taxiway. The shelter themselves, which were reinforced
03:07concrete structures, are still mostly standing. But a hardened aircraft shelter is exactly designed
03:13to survive a near miss and keep the aircraft inside flyable. What the Saki imagery shows is a structure
03:19that held its shape, while everything that mattered inside it, and the door that was supposed to seal it,
03:24didn't survive. This means Russia's answer to Ukraine's mid to long range threat of drones,
03:29which so far has just poured concrete, is already being tested in the field less than a year after
03:34it went up, and it isn't holding the way Russian planners hoped. Here's the timeline that explain
03:40why those shelters exist at all. In June 2025, Ukraine launched the famous Operation Spiderweb,
03:47a mass drone strike deep inside Russian territory against strategic bomber bases, using drones that have
03:52been smuggled into position over months and launched from inside Russia itself. Ukraine claimed hits on
03:58dozens of aircraft at bases, including Belaya, more than 4,000 kilometers from the Ukrainian border.
04:04Since then, Ukrainian regular long-range strikes have reached as far as Engels, roughly 600 kilometers
04:10from the front. Now, before Spiderweb, Russian air defense planning had assumed that distance itself
04:16was a form of protection. If Ukraine couldn't physically reach an airfield, the aircraft parked
04:21on it were safe, full stop, no further investment required. But Ukraine showed that it could reach some of the
04:27most remote corners of Russia, either by piloting drones or delivering them in deep cover operations.
04:33And Russia's response was to start pouring concrete at airfields that had previously used open ramps,
04:38treating hardened shelters as the fix for a threat that open-air parking could no longer survive.
04:44On paper, the protection had merit. If you reinforce the position, you protect the assets inside and
04:50buy back some survivability through structure. The problem is that Ukraine's strike drones adapted
04:55faster than Russia could finish building. The strikes showed that Ukraine's newer drone systems
05:00are specifically chipping away at the protective value those shelters were supposed to provide.
05:05And six out of seven shelters damaged in a single week at one base is exactly the kind of evidence
05:10that supports that claim. So Russia sold one problem, which was exposed aircraft on open airfields,
05:16and in doing so created a new one. That being expensive, obvious, and fixed structures that Ukraine
05:22now knows exactly where to find and how to blow up from the inside out. To understand why this matters
05:28beyond the value of the airframes themselves, we need to talk about what a hangar actually is,
05:33because most coverage of these strikes treats the story as simply a body count of destroyed jets,
05:38and that undersells what's actually being attacked. A fighter jet is not a standalone weapon,
05:44it's the visible tip of an entire support system, and that system is what determines how much combat power
05:50an airfield can actually generate on any given day, a concept called sortie generation. The hangar is
05:56where the labour-intensive part of that cycle happens. Engines get inspected, avionics get tested
06:02and calibrated, weapons get loaded onto hardpoints. All of that depends on trained mechanics, spare parts
06:08inventories, ground support equipment, fuel lines, diagnostic test equipment, and maintenance paperwork.
06:15And all of that needs to sit in one physical location for it to be applied to the actual
06:19aircraft. And in 2026, a drone can reach it. Ukraine doesn't need to put a 50 million dollar
06:26Sudbert ESM on the ground to reduce what that aircraft contributes to the war. It just needs to make the
06:31sortie generation cycle at that base slower, more expensive, and less reliable than it was the week
06:37before, damage the maintenance bay and repair stall, destroy the ground support gear, and a perfectly
06:43fireball aircraft sits idle because nobody can arm or fuel it properly. Knock out radar or air defense
06:49coverage around the field, and the next drone strike arrives with less resistance than the last one
06:54did. An aircraft that can't be deployed on a sortie is that day exactly as useful to Russia as an
07:00aircraft that doesn't exist. That's also why Ukraine keeps hitting the same handful of airfields in
07:06Crimea over and over, instead of chasing a bigger single kill count somewhere else. Ukraine knows where the
07:12bulk of Russia's glide strikes are coming from, so it's going for them precisely to reduce how much
07:16offensive Russia can actually output on any given day. But there's a broader operational logic behind
07:22why Ukraine is hitting so many different target types at once. It's a concept called parallel operations,
07:28and it comes directly out of U.S. Air Force doctrine, which was the same logic that underpinned
07:34coalition air campaigns against Iraq. The idea is simple. A sequential campaign hits one target,
07:40waits, assesses the damage, and then moves to the next target. But a parallel campaign hits many
07:46parts of the enemy system at the same time, including airfields, fuel depots, radar sites,
07:51air defense batteries, rail nodes, ammunition storage, maintenance facilities, and command
07:56infrastructure, all within the same window or as close to simultaneous as available strike capacity
08:02allows. The goal here is what's called systemic shock. When an adversary has to respond to problems
08:09appearing everywhere at once, it can't concentrate its repair and defense resources on any single one
08:14of them. Decisions get made with incomplete information. Resources get pulled in competing
08:19directions across the country. The whole system starts operating slower and worse, everywhere and
08:25all at once. Ukraine is running a version of this with drones, missiles, and special operations
08:31sabotage, but obviously without the scale of the U.S. Air Force. However, the underlying logic is
08:37identical. Saki gets hit twice in one week, then Guardyshka gets hit the same night as the second
08:42strike. Meanwhile, Russian refineries burn in the same stretch of a few weeks. Russia can't mass its
08:48air defense and repair response against any single problem, because there are too many simultaneous
08:53problems competing for the same limited pool of engineers, spare parts, and air defense batteries.
08:59The side that forces its opponent into permanent reactive mode while it stays in the driver's seat,
09:04tends to win the attrition fight over time, even without winning any individual engagement decisively.
09:10Now, here's where we need to zoom out, because the airfield strikes are only half the picture.
09:15While Ukrainian drones have been grinding through hangars in Crimea,
09:18a second and quieter campaign has been degrading Russia's ability to replace what it loses.
09:23That campaign is being fought almost entirely by Western export control regimes,
09:28sanctioned supply chains, and Russia's own defense industrial arithmetic.
09:33Let's put some numbers on the airframe losses first, because they set up why replacement capacity
09:38matters so much. The open source tracking project, Oryx, which only counts losses it can visually
09:44confirm through photographic or video evidence, has documented at least 43 Su-34 fighter bombers and at
09:51least 21 Su-30 series aircraft lost or damaged between the start of the war and June 2026.
09:57And because Oryx requires a visual confirmation for every single entry, these numbers are a floor,
10:03not a ceiling, so the real total is almost certainly higher. Against a pre-war Su-34 fleet,
10:09estimated at roughly 163 aircraft, confirmed losses alone account for a quarter of that entire inventory.
10:15And that's all before counting airframes pulled from service for damage, overdue maintenance or
10:21crew shortages, none of which show up in a visual confirmation loss tracker.
10:25By June 2026, Russia's total confirmed aircraft losses across all fixed-wing types sat around 185,
10:33with broader tallies including all combat aircraft types running at least double that
10:37once helicopters and secondary losses are folded in. In fact, as early as 2024, RAND estimated that
10:44Russia's air force had already fallen to roughly 75% of its pre-war strength due to accelerated wear
10:51and aircraft nearing the end of their service life, and the losses haven't stopped accumulating since.
10:56This is the environment Russia's aircraft industry is supposed to be replacing losses into,
11:01and that's where things get genuinely bad for Moscow.
11:04But before we go any further, make sure you're subscribed to The Military Show.
11:08We follow both recent events and provide long-term and historical analytics
11:12that show exactly how the war is faring on both sides.
11:16Back to Russia's troubles, let's start with the crown jewel program of the VVS, the Su-57 Felon,
11:23a fifth-generation stealth fighter that's been in development for nearly two decades,
11:27and was supposed to be a direct answer to the F-35.
11:30In 2023, Russia's United Aircraft Corporation, UAC, delivered a reported 11 Su-57s to the aerospace forces,
11:39and its CEO publicly pledged to double production going forward.
11:43Instead, deliveries went the other direction. In 2024, the most corroborated estimate was five
11:49aircraft delivered against the target of 22, and UAC ended all of 2025 without a single
11:55officially confirmed delivery of a new Su-57 to the Russian aerospace forces. Analysts did spot images in
12:02the spring of 2025 suggesting two aircraft, tail numbers Red-25 and Red-26, but even that was
12:09speculative because Rostec never officially announced it, which is itself telling.
12:13A defense contractor, confident in its production ramp, publishes numbers, timelines,
12:18and identifiable batches. Russia's Su-57 program has instead gone quiet,
12:23publishing fragments and letting speculation fill the silence. But there might be a simple reason for
12:28that. The UK think tank RUSI published a research paper titled in November 2025,
12:34Vulnerabilities in Sukhoi Production Clipping Russia's Wings. In it, it suggested that Russia's
12:40primary assembly plants at Konsol Mosk on Amor, Novosibirsk, and Irkutsk were already under direct
12:47sanctions. However, it also noted that a significant number of their second and third-tier suppliers,
12:53the companies making titanium airframe components, engine parts, and radar systems,
12:57have managed to avoid restrictions so far, which RUSI flagged as an active gap in the current
13:03sanctions regime, rather than evidence that the vulnerability doesn't exist. But RUSI's
13:08mapping showed that the most critical suppliers, including the engine manufacturer UEC, UMPO and
13:13UFA, titanium supplier VSMPO, Avisma, and radar manufacturer Ryazan State, instrument-making
13:20enterprise, all sit inside the European part of Russia, within range of Ukraine's growing
13:25long-range strike capability. In other words, the same strike logic currently being applied to hangars
13:31in Crimea has a second even more consequential target set, sitting largely unsanctioned and
13:37within reach further north. The bottlenecks compound. The Su-57 was designed around a next-generation
13:43engine known as Isdelier 30, but the aircraft has spent years flying with a transitional engine from
13:48the older AL-41 family, while the newer engine struggled to provide stable performance. A modern
13:54stealth fighter's entire operational promise, its thermal signature, its sensor performance,
13:59its ability to supercruise, is tied to that final engine configuration, and manufacturers are
14:04understandably reluctant to commit to mass production of a plane whose core power plant hasn't been finalized.
14:10When you layer the aforementioned sanctions-driven component shortages on top of that unfinished
14:15engine transition, you get exactly the pattern we're seeing. Aircraft that exist, that fly,
14:20that get rolled out for the occasional publicity flight, but that can't be put into the kind of
14:24steady, predictable production run that actually replaces combat losses. Open-source estimates put
14:30per unit Su-57 costs somewhere between $50 and $100 million, depending on configuration,
14:36and in a wartime economy, the more easily produced Su-34 and Su-35S deliver more immediate combat value
14:43for their cost. So Russian planners appear to be doing exactly what the arithmetic tells them too,
14:49deprioritizing the expensive sanctions choke prestige program in favor of aircraft they can actually get
14:55out of the door, even if those simpler aircraft are also being lost faster. And even the money to fix
15:00any
15:00of this is getting harder to find. In November 2025 at the Dubai Airshow, Rostec CEO Sergei Chemezov
15:08confirmed publicly that Russian defense exports have fallen by roughly half compared to 2022 levels.
15:14He attributed the drop to wartime production being redirected almost entirely toward the Russian military
15:20itself rather than foreign buyers. Before the invasion, Russia was earning something like 1.1 trillion
15:25rubles, about $14 billion a year in arms export revenue, and stood as the world's second largest
15:31arms exporter behind only the US. The Jamestown Foundation's independent analysis suggested the
15:38real collapse is even steeper than Chemezov's own framing suggests, estimating a 92% drop in exports
15:44between 2021 and 2024 alone. The report indicates a combination of redirected wartime production,
15:51sanctions, inflation, and foreign buyers, including traditionally reliable customers like India,
15:57actively turning toward other suppliers. And according to figures from the Stockholm
16:00International Peace Research Institute , Russia's overall share of the global arms
16:06export market has fallen from 21% to just under 7% over five years. This is an unprecedented collapse
16:14for a country that spent decades as one of the top three arms exporters on earth, and which has built
16:19substantial diplomatic influence in the global south, specifically through those weapons relationships.
16:25But this isn't just an export story anymore, as it's showing up in the core financials.
16:30In July 2026, Rostec disclosed that its net profit fell 42% in 2025,
16:37even as revenue rose 25% on the back of higher domestic wartime orders. In one report,
16:42Chesimov himself told Russia's prime minister that the company did have much of its own capital left to
16:48fund new investment projects. How is that possible? Simply put, the government's programs are being
16:53essentially forced upon Rostec to be accepted at significantly lower margins than programs designed
16:58for export. Domestic procurement contracts appear to offer significantly lower profit margins
17:04than export contracts. It's telling that the country that started a war now doesn't want to spend
17:09the money to get quality military gear that could actually help end it, and is trying to
17:14attrit with older tech. Put those two campaigns next to each other, and the result is obvious.
17:19Ukraine is destroying Russian combat aircraft, degrading the hangars, fuel, and ground support
17:24infrastructure that generates sorties from the aircraft that survive, and doing all of it inside
17:29a broader parallel operations campaign designed to overload Russian repair and defense capacity
17:34everywhere at once. At the same time, Western sanctions, export losses, and Russia's own
17:40war time resource allocation are strangling the industrial base that's supposed to replace
17:45every one of those losses. Those two pressures reinforce each other in a positive feedback loop.
17:50Every hardened shelter Russia pours concrete for, and every partially sanctioned supplier still quietly
17:56shipping titanium and radar components into that supply chain is an obvious next target for the
18:01same drones that took the doors off six shelters at Saki. Russi's recommendation from the report
18:07mentioned earlier ties all this together. The West needs to expand sanctions coverage to those
18:12second and third tier suppliers, precisely because that's where the exploitable gap currently sits.
18:17Meanwhile, every additional export contract Russia loses because a buyer like India walks toward a more
18:23reliable supplier is one less source of money Moscow could otherwise use to fund the exact kind of
18:28accelerated production, Russi warns is already faltering. This is the compounding mechanism that makes the
18:34Crimea airfield campaign matter more than its body count suggests. Ukraine doesn't need to win a war
18:39of attrition against Russia's existing aircraft inventory in isolation. It needs Russian losses to
18:45keep outpacing a replacement pipeline that sanctions, lost export revenue, and a supply chain scattered
18:51across sanctioned and unsanctioned suppliers alike, already struggling to sustain on their own with no
18:56outside pressure required. None of this means Russian airpower over Crimea collapses on a fixed timeline,
19:02and we want to be careful not to overstate where this actually goes. Russia still has one of the
19:06largest industrial bases in the world. It can still design airframes, forge titanium structures,
19:12and integrate weapon systems domestically. And it's demonstrated the ability to adapt and innovate
19:17throughout this war, including opening new dedicated facilities for fuel systems and avionics testing.
19:22Even Saki itself can be rebuilt, re-equipped, and re-sheltered if Moscow decides to prioritize it
19:28the way its rebuilt bases before. And parallel operations by their nature only work if the
19:34side running them can sustain the tempo. Ukraine's drone production, while real and growing,
19:39is competing against a Russian air defense network around Crimea that's also being reinforced and
19:44adapted specifically in response to these exact strikes. Strike accuracy itself can degrade if
19:50Russian jamming and electronic warfare improve faster than Ukraine's targeting systems do. What the Saki
19:56strikes and the industrial data do tell us, though, is the direction of travel, and that direction
20:01has been remarkably consistent for more than a year. Russia keeps solving yesterday's vulnerability,
20:06and Ukraine keeps finding the next one, whether that's a newer strike drone that defeats concrete,
20:11or a western sanctions list that hasn't caught up to a specific supplier.
20:15Concrete didn't save Russia's jets at Saki, it just made the problem slightly more photogenic on
20:21satellite imagery. And the problem with the Su-57 isn't solely on production, but how it actually
20:27fares in the air. To learn more, check out this video. And as always, make sure to subscribe to get
20:33daily updates on the most pressing issues in global geopolitics and warfare.
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