Battle Damage Assessment: How Many AWACS Planes Are Left In Russia?

Is it a nonzero number?

Two of Russia’s irreplaceable Beriev A-50 AWACS aircraft in their final moments

Ukraine claimed that more that 40 aircraft were damaged or destroyed in their historic drone attack on Russian aviation this Sunday, including one-third of Russian cruise missile carriers. As public source imagery became available, only 13 cruise missile bombers were confirmed as destroyed in Operation Spiderweb. Today, Ukrainian Military Intelligence (SBU) released a video compliation of FPV drone video feeds that includes at least 19 successful hits on Tu-95 and Tu-22M3 long-range bombers used to attack Ukrainian cities.

Evidence confirming more kills will likely emerge. Less celebrated or argued, however, are the An-12 transport planes destroyed. Aviation logistics are a key weakness of the Russian aerospace forces (VKS) even on a good day, and Sunday was a black one. Then there are the two Beriev A-50s, aged but intact, worth more than twenty Backfire bombers each, as valued in rubles.

Operationally, the A-50 is worth its weight in gold. If OP Spiderweb had only destroyed these two aircraft, and not a single cruise missile carrier, we could still call it a smashing success. Airborne early warning and control (AWACS) is a basic necessity for achieving air supremacy. Russia did not have many of these planes left to begin with, while Ukraine has targeted them throughout the war. So how many of them does Russia even have left?

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The Importance Of One Soviet-Era Airplane

Embedded below is the SBU video compilation. Note that both attacks on the Beriev A-50 aircraft aim for the Liana radar systems in the rotodomes, those awkward disk-shaped objects on top. Even if the rest of the plane is untouched by the attack, it is rendered useless by any damage at all to the radar. Ukrainians reportedly trained AI to execute the attack whenever the drone control signal was lost — a problem that increases the closer the drone gets to the ground — so they would have specifically trained the drones to recognize the Liana radar rotodome and attack it. The clip begins at about the 1:30 mark.

Ukraine has always gone out of their way to target these aircraft. An upgraded A-50U based in Belarus was damaged by anti-government partisans in February 2023 using SBU-provided FPV drones that also attacked the Liana radar rotodomes. At the time, it was widely reported to be just one of nine working examples left in the VKS inventory.

Soviet designers built the A-50 on an Ilyushin Il-76 cargo lifter during the early 1980s. Altogether, “about 40” were produced by the end of the Cold War. However, nowhere near that many A-50s are still flying. While there are plenty of spare parts for the rest of the plane, as more than 900 IL-76s were built, the electronics suites on board not only balloon the cost of building one to somewhere north of $350 million, they also multiply the maintenance and upgrade costs.

Three of the Beriev A-50 aircraft that existed at the end of the Cold War were sold to the Indian Air Force. Here are nine of the remaining 37 at Severny Airfield in Ivanovo, Russia, ca. 2023, awaiting their fate as spare parts for the remaining operational planes.

Ukrainians have also shot down two A-50s with long-range surface-to-air S-200 missiles. Because there is only one facility that repairs and maintains them, Ukraine naturally attacked it. At least two long-range drone strikes in March and December of 2024 hit the Taganrog Aviation Scientific Technical Complex while Beriev A-50s were under repair. The VKS was reportedly down to six planes after the March strike, then five in December.

Now Ukraine claims to have damaged an A-50 along with the two they destroyed, in which case Russia may have just two of them left flying. The operational impact of having just two AWACS planes remaining in the VKS inventory is virtually the same as having none.

No air force in the world has all of its combat aircraft operational at any given moment. Generally speaking, one-third of them are being repaired or upgraded, another third are training up crews, and the remainder are available for operations. With just two planes, there will be big gaps in coverage. Russia did not have scores of spare bombers on Sunday, nor are there any replacement A-50s coming out of Taganrog any time soon. The loss of every AWACS plane erodes Russian airborne command and control because it puts even more stress on the remaining systems.

The upgraded A-50U damaged in Belarus and destroyed at Taganrog flew only one sortie every 4.5 days. Even with midair refueling, a fifteen-man crew (they are still all men in the Russian air regiments) cannot sustain an infinite sortie. Several of these planes would be necessary for Russia to contest Ukrainian airspace 24/7. The fact that Russia cannot keep them in the fight helps to explain why Russian air sorties have been fewer and smaller than prewar analysis expected, never penetrating Ukrainian airspace since the early days in 2022, when losses were heavy.

Operating from 40,000 feet, the Liana radar can detect Ukrainian aircraft 650 kilometers (400 miles) away, directing other aircraft to fire very long-range air-to-air missiles at them. Until now, A-50s have supported bomber missions firing cruise missiles at Ukraine by watching out for any Ukrainian planes that might sortie against them. Without these aircraft supporting them, the strategic cruise missile carriers will be more vulnerable than ever. In fact, Sweden has provided Ukraine with at least one of their exactly two ASC 890 AWACS aircraft.

Now the odds are more even

A-50 operators can also detect targets on the ground, such as tanks, up to 300 kilometres (190 miles) away. That downward-looking capability has been helpful in the Ukrainian theater, particularly during the 2023 counteroffensive. No one is expecting Ukrainians to launch another counteroffensive any time soon, but Ukrainians would surely like to blind Russian command to their movements on the ground in any case.

OP Spiderweb has war planners around the world questioning the safety of their expensive airframes. Chinese purchases of farmland near US military bases suddenly loom more ominously. Drone-resistant hangars are expensive. Counter-drone systems are already the hot new defense tech. To this observer, however, the biggest news of all is that hugely expensive electronic warfare aircraft are a real liability for the air forces which depend on them. Any amount of attrition to them does real injury to the operation of kinetic combat aircraft.