ust last week, Russia made a fatal mistake: according to a British intelligence report, they had shot down one of their own fighter jets. As there German news website merkur.de reports, citing newsweek.com, another Russian fighter jet was brought down over Mariupol on Friday.
The downed fighter jet, according to the report, is an Su-35, a type of jet that was introduced in large numbers to the Russian Air Forces in 2011. It is referred to by NATO with the codename Flanker-E and is sometimes also called Super Flanker. A Russian military blogger responded to the incident on the Telegram platform with irony: “At this working pace of our brave air defense, we will soon be left without aviation,” he writes.
For Russia, it is an expensive mistake. The cost of the loss, according to merkur.de, is estimated by experts to be between 40 to 80 million Euros.
Image: Kremlin.ru, Vladimir Putin (2022-10-10), CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (image size modified)
.jpg){kind=link}