The Russian Air Force (Voyenno-Vozdushnyye Sily - VVS) is set to ground its ageing Tupolev Tu-95 'Bear' strategic bomber fleet for a second time in barely a month after the loss of an aircraft over the country's Far East on 14 July.
The grounding, which had not been ordered at the time of writing but which is standard practice for any Russian aircraft type following a serious accident, will likely be imposed after the aircraft came down in a remote region of Siberia.
According to national media reports, the 1950s-vintage turboprop bomber suffered a technical malfunction related to the aircraft fuel pump, causing it to crash. All seven crew members are said to have escaped the aircraft by parachute and a search is currently under way.
The loss of the bomber comes just five weeks after an accident on take-off led to the VVS' entire fleet of 71 'Bear' bombers being grounded. That cause of that incident on 6 July, in which one crew member was killed, has not yet been publicly revealed.
While such a loss might not be too significant when taken in isolation, the fact that it is the sixth VVS aircraft to crash in the last month-and-a-half lends weight to suggestions that the service is under-resourced and overworked.
At the beginning of June, a MiG-29 'Fulcrum' fighter crashed while operating out of the Ashuluk air defence training range in Astrakhan, to be followed a few days later by a Sukhoi Su-34 'Fullback' strike aircraft that flipped over and landed upside down at an airstrip in the Voronezh region. Another MiG-29 went down while flying out of the VVS training base at Kushchevskaya in the Krasnodar region.
On the same day that the Tu-95 had its fatal runway excursion at Ukrainka airfield in the Amur region of the Russian Far East, a Sukhoi Su-22 'Fencer' strike aircraft came down in the Far East with the loss of both crew members (coming just months after an earlier fatal loss of a Russian Su-24 in February).
Since the beginning of the crisis in Ukraine and the deterioration of relations with the West over his country's annexation of Crimea and its support of pro-Russian separatists, President Vladimir Putin has relied almost exclusively on his air force in general, and the strategic bomber force in particular, to demonstrate his strength and resolve to the outside world. With the VVS still heavily reliant on Soviet-era machines despite ongoing modernisation, this rash of aircraft crashes may be the first indication that his capabilities do not quite match up to the rhetoric.
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