How Drone Strikes Are Shrinking Russia's Tu-95 Fleet

Before launching its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russia operated roughly 58 Tu-95MS strategic bombers, the turboprop type known to NATO as the Bear. The open-source loss tracker Oryx has now documented at least eight of those aircraft destroyed and three more damaged, most recently in a Ukrainian drone attack on Engels Air Base in Russia's Saratov region in July.

The strikes matter because the Tu-95MS is a missile carrier. Each bomber can launch multiple stand-off cruise missiles against Ukrainian cities and critical infrastructure. Ukraine's SBU security service said its long-range drones flew about 800 kilometres to reach Engels and left one aircraft with critical damage, including a tail section torn off. The SBU described the operation as part of a systematic attack on important elements of the Russian war machine, arguing that every strategic bomber eliminated means dozens of missiles that will not be launched at Ukrainian cities.

The bomber losses sit within a broader picture of attrition documented by British military intelligence. Russia has suffered about 1.45 million casualties, including roughly 450,000 deaths, and may have lost more than 10,000 tanks. But the Tu-95 losses are uniquely consequential because the aircraft has been out of production for more than 30 years and remains central to Russia's long-range strike fleet.

Why Russia Cannot Rebuild or Replace the Bear

Why the SBU Is Targeting Engels and the Tu-95MS

Ukraine's focus on the Tu-95MS follows a simple logic: the aircraft is a high-value, hard-to-replace launch platform. Tupolev built the first Tu-95 in 1952 and began series production in 1956, but the modernised Tu-95MS line stopped completely in 1992. That means every destroyed bomber is effectively a permanent subtraction from the fleet unless Russia can repair damaged airframes or somehow restart production, neither of which is currently realistic.

Russian officials have said they will restore the aircraft, but the evidence does not point to a sustainable path. The documented loss of eight aircraft and damage to three more represents about 18 percent of Russia's pre-war fleet. That proportion would be serious for any air force, but it is especially severe for a force built around an irreplaceable legacy type.

Why Russia Cannot Copy the B-52 Boneyard Model

The Tu-95 is often compared with the US Air Force's B-52 Stratofortress, but the two fleets face very different maintenance realities. The United States keeps an operational fleet of 58 B-52s, holds 18 more in reserve, and preserves dozens of additional airframes at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona, where they can be restored or used for parts. Russia has no comparable storage system: it lacks both a vast desert environment suited to long-term aircraft preservation and, according to the report's assessment, the funding to maintain a large reserve fleet.

That difference is the core of the strategic problem. The United States can sustain a 1950s-era heavy bomber fleet through reserves and parts; Russia cannot. Each Ukrainian strike on a Tu-95MS therefore does not merely damage an airframe, it permanently reduces the total long-range strike capacity available to Moscow for the remainder of the war and beyond.

What the Tu-95 Losses Mean for Long-Range Strike Operations

For defence planners and analysts, the Tu-95 attrition data point to several specific consequences:

  • Ukraine's targeteers can treat the Engels operation as proof that long-range drones can reach a key Russian strategic aviation base roughly 800 kilometres inside Russia. The direct civilian-protection logic is that each destroyed Tu-95MS removes a platform for multiple future cruise-missile launches.
  • Russian aerospace planners face an irreplaceable loss. With no production line since 1992 and no Boneyard-style reserve, the eight destroyed bombers are effectively gone; the three damaged aircraft are the only part of the reported loss that might plausibly return to service.
  • Outside analysts can use Oryx's documented tally as a concrete benchmark. Satellite imagery showing whether any damaged Tu-95MS airframes later reappear intact at Engels will indicate whether Russia has even a limited repair capacity or whether the losses are permanent.