Ukrainian pilots like Andri wait every night in an aircraft hangar, in an undisclosed location, until the tension is broken with a shouted command: “Air!”.
Andri rushes into his Su-27 supersonic jet and soon takes it to the runway, taking off immediately. He takes off so quickly that he doesn’t even know what his mission will be for that night, although the general context is always the same: fighting a Russian air force vastly superior in numbers, but which has not yet managed to gain control of the Ukrainian skies.
“I don’t do security checks,” said Andri, a Ukrainian air force pilot who, as a condition of giving the interview, was not allowed to give his last name or rank. “I just take off.”
Almost a month has passed since the fighting began, one of the biggest surprises of the war in Ukraine has been the fact that Russia has not defeated the Ukrainian Air Force. Military analysts predicted that Russian forces would destroy or cripple Ukrainian air defenses in a short time, but neither the one nor the other happened. Instead, air combat between enemy planes, in the style of “Top Gun – Indomitable Aces”, rare in modern warfare, is being fought in the skies of the country.
“Each time I take off, it’s for real combat,” says Andri, 25, who has served in ten missions in the war. “There is no level playing field in combat. They always have five times as many” planes in the air.
The success of the Ukrainian pilots has helped protect soldiers on the ground and prevent major bombings in cities, because the pilots have already intercepted some Russian cruise missiles. Ukrainian officials also say that the country’s forces have already shot down 97 Russian fixed-wing aircraft. That number could not be verified, but wreckage from Russian fighter jets has already fallen on rivers, fields and houses.
The Ukrainian Air Force operates in almost complete secrecy. Its fighter jets can take off from runways in the west of the country, from bombed airports but which retain enough runway to allow landings or take-offs. They can even take off from highways. They are vastly outnumbered: Russia is believed to fly around 200 air missions a day, while Ukraine launches five to ten.
But Ukrainian pilots have an advantage. In most of the country, Russian planes fly over territory controlled by Ukrainian military forces, which can deploy anti-aircraft missiles to attack planes. “Ukraine has been effective in the sky because we operate in our own country,” said spokesman Yuri Ihnat. “The enemy that enters our airspace is entering the zone of our air defense systems.” He described the strategy as luring Russian planes into air defense traps.
Dave Deptula, director of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies and lead planner for the Desert Storm air campaign in Iraq, said the impressive performance of the Ukrainian pilots has helped offset the numerical disadvantage. According to him, Ukraine now has about 55 operational fighter jets, a number that has been decreasing due to downed planes and mechanical failures that occur because Ukrainian pilots “demand maximum performance” from their planes.
President Volodymyr Zelensky has made several appeals to Western governments to resupply the Ukrainian air force and has called for NATO to impose a no-fly zone over the country, a measure that the leaders refuse to adopt. Slovakia and Poland are considering sending MiG-29 fighter jets, which Ukrainian pilots could use with minimal additional training, but no transfers have yet been made.
“Russian troops have already fired almost a thousand missiles and countless bombs against Ukraine,” Zelensky said on March 16, speaking by video to the US Congress and calling for more planes. “And you know that they exist and that you have them, but they are on land, not in Ukraine – in the sky of Ukraine.”
Deptula said the transfer of these jets is crucial. “If they don’t get new planes, their planes will run out before they run out of pilots,” he said. Unmanned drones are also a tool in the Ukrainian military arsenal, but they do not participate in the battle for control of airspace.
Ukraine uses a Turkish-made drone, the Bayraktar TB-2, a slow, propeller-driven aircraft that is lethally effective at destroying tanks or artillery cannons on the ground but cannot hit targets in the air. If Ukrainian air defenses fail, Russian jets could shoot down the drones.
As is the case with other aspects of the Ukrainian war effort, volunteers play a role in air battles. A network of volunteers observes and listens to the Russian jets, reporting estimated coordinates, speed and altitude. Other commercial Ukrainian pilots have taken modern civil navigation equipment from their planes and handed them over to the Air Force if they can be of use.
Air-to-air combat is rare in modern warfare, and there have been only a few isolated examples of it in recent decades. American pilots, for example, have not carried out extensive air-to-air missions against other planes since the first Iraq War in 1991. Since then, American fighter jets have engaged in air-to-air combat on only a few occasions, having shot down ten planes during the US Civil War. Balkans and a plane in Syria, according to Deptula.
Andri says that on night missions he uses instruments to detect the positions of enemy planes and claims to have shot down Russian jets, but was not authorized to say how many or what type. He said its targeting system is capable of firing at planes a few dozen kilometers away. “I’m usually in charge of hitting targets that are flying, of intercepting enemy jets,” he said. “I wait for my missile to identify the target. Then I press ‘fire’.”
He said that when he shoots down a Russian jet, he is happy, “because this plane will no longer bomb my peaceful cities.” “As we see in practice, that’s exactly what Russian jets do.”
Air clashes in Ukraine have mostly been at night, as Russian planes attack in the dark, when they are least vulnerable to air defenses. Andri said that in the fighting in Ukraine the Russians have been using a number of modern Sukhoi jets such as the Su-30, Su-34 and Su-35.
“I’ve been in situations where I’ve approached a Russian plane, at enough distance to be able to aim and fire,” he said. “I could already detect the plane, but I was waiting for my missile to identify the target, while the ground control was warning me that a missile had already been fired at me.”
He is said to have performed a series of extreme tilt, dive and climb maneuvers with his jet to deplete the fuel supply of the missiles that were coming at him. “The time I have to save myself depends on the distance from which the missile was fired at me and the type of missile,” he said.
Even so, he said, “I still feel a huge surge of adrenaline in my body, because every flight is a fight.” Andri decided to become a pilot when he was a teenager and graduated from the Air Force School in Kharkiv. “Neither I nor my friends ever thought we would have to face a real war,” he commented. “But things didn’t turn out as we expected.”
He took his wife to live in a safer part of Ukraine, but said she did not leave the country. She spends her time sewing homemade camouflage nets for the Army. Andri said she never tells family members when she’s leaving on a mission. He only calls them when he returns from an overnight flight.
“I just need to use my skills to win,” Andri said. “I’m more skillful than the Russians. On the other hand, many of my friends, even those who were more experienced than I, are dead.”
