The Russian Air Force’s recent and not a little embarrassing loss of another $42 million aircraft and crew during dogfights in Ukraine is all but certain, but solid evidence supports reports that a Ukrainian pilot orchestrated Kiev’s first-ever F-16 kill a Russian plane has scored is quite difficult to find, a fact check from Kyiv Post about the engagement found. The first report of the engagement seems to have appeared on a Telegram channel written by an old milblogger called VDV Za Chesnost’ I Spravedlivost, at 12:23 on Saturday, October 12. The full text of the Russian-language report of the shoot-down said: “Urgent!!! Our Su-34 was shot down. The crew was killed. The aircraft was shot down during a FAB (high explosive bomb) drop with a UMPK (glide bomb kit mounted on the bomb), approximately 50 km from the front line. Our Su-34 was apparently shot down by an F-16, which was over enemy-controlled territory. There will be more such losses soon. NATO has sent F-16s to hunt. Now fewer FABs will fly to the Ukrainians. Consequently, our infantry losses will increase.”

The Sukhoi-34 (NATO reporting name: Fullback) is Russia’s most modern attack aircraft. In the fight against Ukraine, the aircraft usually carries out missions that involve launching glide bombs from beyond the range of Ukrainian air defenses.

According to previous reports on the channel, the author VDV is a Russian paratrooper officer serving with the Kremlin forces deployed in southern Ukraine. By the standards of the Russian-Ukrainian war, the readership is modest, with 12,400 followers. The channel started on July 18, 2023, relatively late for major pro-Russian milbloggers, most of whom started creating content in late 2010.

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In stark contrast to the longer-standing pro-Moscow platforms, some of whose creators appear openly on Russian state media, the content published by VDV has remained anonymous, but has also been consistently critical of Russia’s military leadership, especially with regard to General Mikhail Teplinskiy , the commander of the Russian Armed Forces Group South. The VDV channel calls almost daily for Teplinskiy’s dismissal on grounds of incompetence.

VDV’s report on a Ukrainian F-16 downing a Russian Su-34 quickly went viral and worldwide, spreading across oceans and on mainstream news platforms within hours. Kyiv Post researchers found the VDV’s report on the alleged shooting cited in news media in South America, China and in major publications on both sides of the Atlantic.

According to multiple sources, the Russian plane crashed east of the Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk, on the eastern Donbas front. Images of ground debris, which usually become public quickly after the destruction of a Russian fighter plane, were not visible on either Ukrainian or Russian military information platforms for 60 hours after the VDV report.

A single video of a falling Su-34, which was passed back and forth between some bloggers on Sunday, appeared to be a retread of a shoot-down video captured in 2022.

Some Russian milbloggers have claimed that the VDV Telegram channel, which claims to be commentary and opinion from a patriotic Russian military member, is in fact a Ukrainian false flag operation pushing bad news about the Russian military to Russian-language social media. VDV channel managers had not responded to a request for comment from Kiev Post at the time this article was posted.

The hugely popular Russian milblogger FighterBomber, a fiercely anti-Ukrainian Telegram contributor closely associated with and openly supportive of the Russian Air Force, confirmed in an October 13 post that the plane had been lost during operations.

Claims that an F-16 shot down the Su-34 are unfounded, he said, because the Ukrainian air force keeps the NATO-standard aircraft away from the front lines as a matter of policy, for fear of media and public affairs. an F-16 to be shot down. VDV’s claims are Kiev-generated fake news, he told more than 500,000 followers.

“Dear subscribers. The war has entered its third year. Wars are not only fought on the battlefield, but also on the internet. Both ours and others are fighting for your, in some places, immature brain,” read an angry October 13 post. “They piss in your ears or don’t tell you the whole truth, or don’t tell you anything at all. It is different in all cases. Some people get paid for a pure lie.”

Both crew members were killed and the plane was a total loss, he said.

Major Ukrainian media have covered the news story F-16 vs. Su-34 was reported cautiously, with most pointing out that neither the Russian Ministry of Defense nor Ukrainian officials had commented on the incident at all. Articles clearly linking confirmation of the shooting to major Western publications, rather than a Ukrainian or Russian source, were common. Almost everyone quoted the VDV blog post and called it unconfirmed.

The Ukrainian Air Force had not responded to a request for comment from the Kiev Post on Monday afternoon. In the Russian Defense Ministry’s public information feeds from Saturday to Monday, there was no mention of the loss of a Russian Air Force aircraft.

Russian information platform Voina S Feykami (War With Fake News) claimed on Sunday that the VDV report conflated a real crash of a Su-34 in training in East Siberia’s Khabarovsk region with imagined combat activities in eastern Ukraine.

VDV said its information was accurate and pointed out that until War With Fake News reported it, the Russian media had not admitted that the Russian air force had lost an Su-34 in a training crash in the Far East.

FighterBomber said possible causes for the loss of the Su-34, location unspecified, included maintenance, weather conditions and pilot error, but Ukrainian military action was not one of them. He said that when the Su-34 went down, the crew was “fighting” during combat operations.

Kyiv Post analysis using Russian reports on the location of the Su-34 crash, and specifications of the F-16s used by the Ukrainian air force, showed that a long-range missile from Ukraine’s airspace was technically possible, but much riskier than known assignments where Kiev has used the aircraft in the past.

If a Ukrainian F-16 had tracked down and shot down a Russian Su-34 some 50 kilometers behind the battle line, the Ukrainian aircraft would have had to have been at an altitude that certainly made it visible to Russian anti-aircraft radars, and almost certainly well within the range of Russian ground-launched missiles, Kyiv Post researchers concluded.

In order to take a shot at an Su-34 that was on its way to drop a hover bomb, the Ukrainian pilot would probably have had to fly a fairly predictable trajectory that could have been intercepted relatively easily by an anti-aircraft missile, at an altitude which was easily visible to the anti-aircraft fire. Russian air defense systems, for about a minute, an investigation found.

The high risk of being shot down while attempting to intercept a Russian fighter-bomber on its way to drop a hover bomb is one reason why the Ukrainian Air Force’s few F-16s have not been seen in the past while they attacked incoming Russian aircraft. According to news reports, Ukraine received six F-16s donated by Denmark in late July.

So far, the Ukrainian Air Force has admitted the loss of one F-16 in the battle. According to reports, a fighter jet piloted by Oleksii Mes crashed and burned during a Russian missile and drone attack on civilian targets in Ukraine’s deep northwest on August 28. The Air Force investigation into the incident is ongoing. Ukrainian news agencies have reported that Mes may have flown his plane into the debris of the drone he had just shot down.