Ukraine 'Destroyed' Su-34 Combat Jet on Airfield Deep Inside Russia: Kyiv

Ukrainian forces destroyed a Sukhoi Su-34 jet at an airbase deep inside Russia on Thursday, according to a local report.

Intelligence sources told news outlet Ukrainska Pravda that an attack on the Shagol airfield in Chelyabinsk, Russia, was carried out by Ukraine's military intelligence agency. Chelyabinsk is located nearly 2,000 kilometers (1,242 miles) east of Ukraine's border.

Newsweek could not independently verify the report and has contacted Ukraine's intelligence agency and Russia's defense ministry via email for comment.

"Ukrainian Intelligence Directorate is taking credit for a Russian Su-34 destroyed last night in Chelyabinsk at the Shagol airfield. Good," a post on the X (formerly Twitter) account Jay in Kyiv reads.

The reported incident comes soon after Ukrainian Air Force Commander Mykola Oleshchuk claimed Russia had lost three Su-34s in a single day.

Other losses of the $50 million bombers have been self-inflicted.

Russia's Defense Ministry said in a statement in September 2023 that an Su-34 crashed in Russia's Voronezh region. Officials said the supersonic jet was destroyed "while performing a scheduled training flight" and that the cause of the crash could have been a technical malfunction.

Its two crew members were able to safely eject from the aircraft before it crashed.

In October 2022, another Su-34 crashed into a residential building in a small port town in the Krasnodar Krai region of western Russia during a training flight, killing 15 people on the ground, authorities said.

"While climbing to undertake a training flight from a military airfield in the southern military district, an Su-34 aircraft crashed," the Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement at the time. "According to the report of the ejected pilots, the cause of the plane crash was the ignition of one of the engines during takeoff."

And In March 2022, another Su-34 crashed in Yenakievo, in Ukraine's eastern Donetsk Oblast, with reports indicating Ukraine wasn't involved, according to the Baza Telegram channel, which has links with Russia's security services.

According to data compiled by Newsweek in August 2023, more than a fifth of Russia's known manned aircraft and helicopter losses since Moscow launched its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 have not been the result of enemy action.

Dutch open-source intelligence defense analysis website Oryx has visually confirmed that 91 Russian aircraft have been destroyed and eight damaged since the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine.

Oryx has also visually confirmed that 76 Ukrainian aircraft have been destroyed since the beginning of Russia's "special operation," with one damaged and one captured.

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