Nuclear triad blow: The Russian Federation has no resources to replace strategic bombers

According to the SBU official data, Russia's losses are estimated at $ 7 billion. However, to find out the real scale of the damage caused, it is necessary to take into account the fact that it is a non -repayable loss, since in the Russian Federation new strategic bombers are not produced. Analysts noted that the enemy aircraft shocks were not repaired.

And every loss of such aircraft is irreversible in the foreseeable future, since since the 1990s Russia has actually stopped the production of new strategic bombers. For example, today new Tu-160m2 is collected from the corps that have remained since the Soviet times. Since 2022, only two new machines have been harvested, two more are at different stages of assembly. All other Tu-160 are upgraded.

According to various sources, the PCS of the Russian Federation is 12 to 18 of these aircraft, with up to five of them are upgraded at the factory in Kazan. The situation is even more difficult with Tu-95MC: the production of these aircraft is stopped completely. The total number of such machines in Russia is estimated from 40 to 60, but not everyone is in a flight state. From 2013, 18 to 27 of them have been modernized to the Tu-95MSM version for the use of winged X-101 rockets.

As for TU-22M3, it formally belongs to the distant, not strategic bombers, and is able to carry only the missiles X-22 and X-32. Attempts to modernize the TU-22m3m version with an extended spectrum of weapons are being promoted very slowly, despite the presence of corps that have been stored in the open sky since the 1990s.

The authors of the publication stressed that the only real opportunity for the Russian Federation to compensate for the loss of strategic bombers is the development and production of a new type - Pak Yes. However, even in this direction, the terms are extremely distant. The final configuration was approved only in 2021, and to date, according to open data, there is only a static specimen for land tests.