A Russian air force Tupolev Tu-95 Bear bomber crashed on takeoff, apparently from Ukrainka air base in Amur Oblast in Russia's Far East. The Russian defense ministry said the plane was on a training flight without munitions and blamed a technical fault. The crash, while reportedly accidental, is still a win of sorts for Ukraine. Every bomber the Russians lose is a bomber they can't immediately replace—and sortie for missile strikes on Ukrainian cities.

The problem for Ukraine is that Russia still has bombers to spare. It'll take more than a few crashes or drone raids on Russian bomber bases to cut into Russia's capacity to bombard Ukraine.

That's why Ukraine needs missile-armed fighters, ground-based self-propelled guns, speedy interceptor drones, and long-range surface-to-air missiles such as American-made Patriots, among other air defenses. The Ukrainians can't prevent missile attacks by destroying bombers or waiting for bombers to crash; they need to shoot down missiles as they near their targets.

A security camera on the ground recorded a large aircraft plunging toward the ground in Amur Oblast on Tuesday night. Video from the crash site confirmed it was one of the Russians' four-engine, propeller-driven Tu-95s, aging workhorses in Russia's escalating campaign of missile and drone attacks on Ukrainian cities.

The crash killed six crew and left one survivor injured, according to Russian state media. It is the first Tu-95 to go down in 11 years, Defense Express notes, and the first known non-combat loss of the type since the full-scale invasion.

It's potentially the 11th Tu-95 Russia has lost since widening its war on Ukraine in February 2022. Ukrainian drones caught two Bears on the ground at Engels-2 air base in Saratov Oblast in July and August. On 1 June 2025, Ukraine's Operation Spiderweb—coordinated strikes on Russian bomber bases by more than 100 small drones smuggled across Russia in trucks—destroyed as many as four Bears at Olenya air base on the Kola Peninsula and another four at Belaya air base in Irkutsk Oblast.

Now the Russian air force may be down to somewhere between 36 and 44 working Tu-95s, depending on the count, the youngest of which rolled out of the factory in the 1990s. That matters because the Tu-95 is, like the jet-propelled Tupolev Tu-22M bomber, out of production. Vendors have gone out of business. The skilled workers who assembled the types retired decades ago.

While the Russians can still build one or two Tupolev Tu-160 jet bombers every year, slowly growing a fleet that currently stands at around 18 active planes, that's far too few new bombers to replace combat losses as the wider war grinds through its 56th month.

Slow attrition

The Russians have also lost at least nine Tu-22Ms, and possibly far more: Defense Express estimates losses at up to 70% of the combat-ready fleet since 2022. All told, Russia's bomber force has shrunk to around 105 planes since the wider war began, or fewer.

Equally problematically for the Russians, the old Tu-95s and Tu-22Ms that carry out the majority of air-launched cruise missile strikes on Ukraine are wearing out from heavy use; not all are available for front-line use as more airframes spend more time in deep maintenance.

Explore further

Ukraine is working down the short list of ships that shell its cities with cruise missiles. A Neptune reached one of them tied up at its own pier

But a Tu-95 carries as many as eight Kh-101 cruise missiles at a time; a Tu-22M carries up to three Kh-22s or Kh-32s. A Russian drone and missile strike might include just a dozen or so air-launched cruise missiles launched by a handful of bombers. A raid on 8 September involved just four Tu-95s and two Tu-160s.

The Russians don't need 105 bombers to sustain six-bomber raids once or twice a week, even as those bombers suffer more and more wear and tear. Ukraine would have to take out a lot more Russian bombers, and fast, to put a dent in Russian strikes.

Unless and until that unlikelihood happens, Ukraine will still need to defeat Russian raids inside Ukraine—by shooting down hundreds of incoming drones and missiles at a time. But that's getting harder as the Russians deploy faster jet-propelled Geran drones and more ground-launched Iskander missiles, combining them with the bomber-launched missiles in complex packages that routinely overwhelm ammunition-starved Ukrainian air defenses.

Bulgaria gave Ukraine 110 BTR-60 armored personnel carriers. They are 1960s vehicles, too thinly armored to carry infantry anywhere near a front line patrolled by explosive drones. So Ukraine's 3rd Army Corps found another use for them during Operation Vivaldi, its counteroffensive north of Lyman. Fill one with anti-tank mines, rig it for remote control, drive it at a Russian bunker, and set it off.

Packing potentially dozens of TM-62 anti-tank mines, the speedy BTR-60s become what's called vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices, or VBIEDs. Once a favorite weapon of insurgents battling US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, VBIEDs have found a new niche in Russia's wider war on Ukraine as unmanned demolition systems.

"To break through the enemy's defenses, the 3rd Army Corps employed its own invention, Soviet BTR-60s converted into robotic kamikaze complexes," the corps stated. "They were used to demolish the enemy's strongest fortifications." If an enemy strongpoint is too heavily protected to bomb from the air but exposed to attack from the ground, send in a VBIED.

The Russians were the first to deploy vehicular IEDs in the current war, but the Ukrainians may have mastered the tactic. It's one thing to rig an explosives-filled MT-LB tractor or T-55 tank to roll straight forward without direct human control, as the Russians once did. It's another to rig an explosive BTR-60 to maneuver before going off, as the 3rd Army Corps' VBIEDs clearly did.

On 28 September, announcing the close of Vivaldi's third phase, the 3rd Army Corps released drone footage depicting one of the explosive BTRs blasting a Russian strongpoint north of the town of Lyman. The sheer scale of the explosion is testimony to the VBIED's destructive potential. And the trail the BTR leaves in the grass in the heavily edited video indicates the Ukrainians can steer their VBIEDs around obstacles and guide them to precision strikes.

Why it gets there

A slow wheeled vehicle crossing open ground toward a fortified position should not survive the trip. In most sectors it would not. What makes the tactic work north of Lyman is a condition the 3rd Army Corps built into Vivaldi before its assault groups moved: Ukrainian air defense and electronic warfare threw a protective dome over the battle area, blinding Russian drones so they could not read the operation's design or strike what was moving through it.

Robots have played critical roles in each phase of Vivaldi. Surveillance drones have watched from overhead. One-way attack drones have pummeled Russian positions and supply lines. Heavy bomber drones have not only dropped bombs, they've also airlifted explosive unmanned ground vehicles into position so the UGVs can roll right through the front doors of Russian bunkers.

The self-exploding BTR-60s are too big to airlift, but that's the point. A small UGV might carry a few tens of kilograms of explosives. A remote-controlled BTR-60 can easily haul hundreds of kilograms.

Explore further

Ukraine outfoxes Russia near Donetsk’s fortress belt with Soviet BTR-60s rebuilt as kamikaze robots, storms a key hub and takes 250 Russian prisoners

The arithmetic

It's not impossible to take out a VBIED before it strikes, of course. Mines, anti-tank missiles, and even concentrated gunfire can stop a vehicular bomb in its tracks. But losing one of the aged BTR-60s costs Ukraine very little. The vehicles are too thinly armored for use as front-line infantry transports anyway. You might as well convert them into bombs.

That is the whole case for the tactic. A manned fighter jet lobbing a precision glide bomb is the preferred approach to bunker-busting. But it costs tens of thousands of dollars an hour to keep a jet in the air, and a single glide bomb can cost tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's unclear how much it costs to convert a BTR into a VBIED. It could be just a few thousand.

And it reduces Russian fortifications without risking any Ukrainian lives. That's the philosophy underpinning all of the 3rd Army Corps' robot-first tactics. "This is exactly the direction of the corps' development set by Brig. Gen. Andrii Biletskyi," the corps stated, "to reduce the number of fighters in the most dangerous areas and replace them with robots."

Vivaldi began in mid-April under an information blackout that held for five months. The corps says it has regained control of 176 sq km across three of a planned four phases, around half of that de-occupied outright, and taken more than 250 Russian prisoners. Those figures are the corps' own and have not been independently verified.

Sometimes the robots doing that work are 60-year-old APCs modified for an explosive one-way mission.

Explore further

Ukraine retook 240 square km north of Lyman and nobody reported it for three months

1960s-vintage, Soviet-made T-62Ms aren't the oldest tanks in the Ukrainian inventory. That dubious honorific belongs to Ukraine's ex-Slovenian M-55S tanks, which are based on Soviet-made T-55s from the 1950s.

The T-62M hasn't gotten better. The job has changed. These days, many tanks on both sides function as mobile artillery, angling their guns high to fire a few rounds at targets kilometers away. They rarely work as tanks, closing with the enemy and firing directly from a few hundred meters. The threat from tiny explosive drones has pushed armor back from the gray zone, and at that distance a T-62M is not much less effective than a T-64BV. Or, for that matter, than a far more precious Leopard 1, Leopard 2, or M-1.

That is one reading of a war that has changed shape, and nobody has published a study of it. Ukraine's T-64, Leopard, and Abrams fleets have all taken heavy documented losses. Oryx, which logs a loss only where photos or video exist, lists no Ukrainian T-62Ms at all.

These tanks, all captured from the Russians, are also available. And that matters in a military struggling to sustain its tank force. As Russia's war on Ukraine grinds through its 56th month, Ukraine is running low on its newest and best tanks. Older and less capable ones fill in ... for lack of a better alternative.

Explore further

A rare Ukrainian Bulat tank turned up in a brigade that never had them

Observer Stevius, who closely tracks developments in the Ukrainian armor corps, recently highlighted the ongoing importance of former Russian T-62Ms to the Ukrainian war effort. "Captured T-62Ms still out there!"

Specifically, Stevius noted an ex-Russian T-62M belonging to the Ukrainian National Guard's 19th Brigade participating in a recent competition for best tank crew in the National Guard. According to Stevius, at least two other Ukrainian units have operated the survivors of at least 45 T-62Ms that Ukrainian troops have captured. Most of the captures took place during the Ukrainian counteroffensives in eastern and southern Ukraine in late 2022.

Lesser tanks

The 40-ton, four-person T-62M is Ukraine's second-oldest tank, and where the slightly older M-55S got a deep upgrade in 1990s Slovenia, the T-62M has not. In its DNA it is still a vehicle of the early Cold War. The Ukrainian army's 110th Mechanized Brigade temporarily operated T-62Ms before swapping them out for much newer and more capable T-64BVs. Where the T-62M has a 115-millimeter main gun loaded by hand by a fourth crew member, the T-64BV has a more powerful 125-millimeter gun loaded by a fast mechanical autoloader.

The fast-firing capability of the made-in-Ukraine T-64BV was central to the Ukrainian 1st Tank Brigade's successful defense of the city of Chernihiv during the early weeks of the wider Russian invasion starting in February 2022. The Ukrainian tanks engaged passing Russian tanks at point-blank range, and out-shot them.

That is the kind of fight the T-62M would lose. It is a kind of fight fewer tanks now get.

Explore further

Russia has thousands of tanks it can’t risk. One drone shield decides whether they roll

Surely some of the 60-something-year-old T-62Ms in Ukrainian service have been withdrawn owing to wear and tear and a possible shortage of spare parts. But there's a good chance most of the 45 Ukrainian T-62Ms are still in, or near, the action.

But not all are still tanks. Seeing the value in the thickly protected hull and reliable chassis that carries the T-62M's turret and gun, Ukrainian volunteers and units have converted some captured T-62Ms into specialist vehicles that benefit from the tanks' sturdy bottoms but don't need their obsolescent tops.

A few ex-Russian T-62Ms have undergone conversion into recovery vehicles by losing their turrets and guns and adding a heavy-duty winch for towing other armored vehicles. Volunteers working with the Serhiy Prytula Charity Foundation turned another into a heavy infantry fighting vehicle. The recipe is simple. Just pop off the existing turret and replace it with a smaller one fitted with a 30-millimeter autocannon, in this case one pulled from a captured Russian BMP-2.

Potentially dozens of Ukrainian T-62Ms are still T-62Ms, however, and still adding bulk and firepower to units that otherwise might struggle to deploy any tanks at all.