Russian Su-57 fighters have stopped high-tempo cruise missile operations along nearly the entire length of the Ukrainian front, with Ukrainian air raid monitoring services recording less than ten confirmed launch events during May and June, a pace of operations that had been significantly curtailed following a Ukrainian drone strike deep inside Russia earlier this spring and the arrival of a Swedish Gripen fighter jet.
Russia fears that losing the Su-57 to either the F-16 or the Gripen fighter jet might derail its attempts to sell the aircraft to India and Algeria. Armed with a 250 km-range Meteor BVRAAM, Gripen now poses a significant threat to Russia’s Su-57.
The alerts, documented across multiple Ukrainian air raid warning channels including the eRadar and the Monitor groups, show a consistent operational pattern: Su-57 aircraft operating in the Kursk Oblast border region, over the Azov Sea near Mariupol, and in the Crimea and southern sectors, launching Kh-59 and Kh-69 cruise missiles while remaining well outside the range of Ukrainian air defense systems and fighter aircraft. Specific alerts logged throughout May record a Su-57 firing Kh-59/69 missiles on a course toward Dnipro, another operating near the Kursk-Sumy border with possible cruise missile launches, and a third detected over the Azov Sea near Mariupol with cruise missiles reported. The alerts uniformly describe the aircraft as maintaining standoff positioning deep within Russian or Russian-occupied airspace.
The Su-57, known to NATO as the Felon, is Russia’s most advanced combat aircraft, a 4+ generation fighter designed to carry weapons internally to execute both air-to-air and air-to-ground missions against peer competitors.
Russia has operated a small fleet of the type, with production constrained by industrial capacity and the aircraft’s complexity. Because of those limited numbers, Moscow has been reluctant to risk Su-57s in missions that would require them to penetrate Ukrainian air defense coverage, and the aircraft have instead been used primarily in a standoff strike role, launching long-range cruise missiles from positions well behind the front where Ukrainian Patriot batteries and fighter aircraft cannot credibly threaten them.
The Kh-59MK2 and its successor, the Kh-69, developed by Russia’s MKB Raduga design bureau and designated AS-22 Kazoo by NATO, are the primary weapons the Su-57 has been deploying.
The Kh-69 is a subsonic air-launched cruise missile with a range of approximately 400 kilometers (250 miles), a reduced radar cross-section compared to earlier Russian cruise missiles, and the ability to fly as low as 20 meters (66 feet) above ground level, making it extremely difficult to detect and engage with radar-based air defense systems. As The Defence Blog reported when the missile was first confirmed in Ukrainian debris in 2024, Ukrainian bomb disposal teams recovered an intact Kh-69 warhead near a residential building in Kyiv, providing Ukraine and its partners with physical evidence of the weapon’s configuration and guidance systems.
The high tempo of Su-57 operations during May comes after a period of reduced activity that followed Ukraine’s remarkable long-range drone strike on the Shagol airfield in the Chelyabinsk region of Russia, approximately 1,700 kilometers (1,056 miles) from the Ukrainian border, in late April 2026. Satellite imagery analyzed by the Exilenova+ analytical community and published on May 1, 2026 showed visible impact sites in aircraft parking areas at Shagol, with at least two Su-57s and one Su-34 appearing to have been relocated from their original positions following the strike, a movement pattern consistent with damage assessment and loss prevention procedures. Russia’s Ministry of Defense issued no official statement confirming aircraft losses or damage, but the imagery was assessed by open-source analysts as evidence of a successful strike on one of the most strategically important aircraft in Russia’s inventory.
After that strike, Su-57 activity near the front appeared to drop, with monitoring sources noting fewer detections along launch corridors. The May uptick documented in the eRadar alerts and @monitor channel posts suggests Russia has assessed the threat level and returned the aircraft to operational tempo, though still maintaining the same standoff employment doctrine that has defined Su-57 operations throughout the war.
Military Watch Magazine, which tracks Russian aerospace developments, reported in May 2026 that Su-57 operations had intensified with “whole formations” of the aircraft conducting strikes, a significant escalation in sortie rates for a platform previously committed very sparingly.
The operational pattern has significant implications for how Russia is using the Su-57 to develop and demonstrate the platform’s capabilities. Rostec CEO Sergey Chemezov told reporters in December 2025 that the Su-57 was “evading enemy radars and electronic warfare systems” in the conflict, language that appears calibrated as much for a foreign audience as a domestic one.
The export dimension running through Russia’s Su-57 operational pattern is impossible to ignore. Russia has been actively marketing the aircraft to India for years, a campaign that has faced persistent skepticism from Indian analysts who have noted the aircraft’s limited combat role and questioned why Moscow keeps its most advanced fighter so far from the front. Russian state media and pro-military bloggers have amplified footage and reports of Su-57 patrols along the Finnish border and test flights of new weapons as part of what several analysts have described as a deliberate demonstration strategy, showing potential customers that the aircraft is capable and combat-active. The sustained May strikes over Ukraine contribute to the same narrative, providing a body of operational data that Russia’s marketing apparatus can reference when competing with Western fifth-generation offerings.
Ukraine’s challenge is that the Su-57’s standoff employment doctrine makes it extremely difficult to threaten. The aircraft launches from positions 200 to 400 kilometers (124 to 249 miles) behind the front, well beyond the effective range of Patriot and NASAMS batteries positioned to protect Ukrainian cities, and at altitudes and in airspace corridors where Ukrainian fighter jets would need to penetrate deep into Russian or Russian-held territory to intercept. The drone strike on Shagol demonstrated that Ukraine has developed a credible capability to reach the aircraft at its home airfields, and the temporary reduction in Su-57 activity following that strike suggests the threat was taken seriously. Whether the current operational resumption reflects a permanent recalibration or a calculated risk tolerance will become clearer in the weeks ahead, as monitoring services continue to log each time a Felon crosses from test pilot footage into the skies above a war zone.
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