The design priority was almost certainly to build a “stealth” plane cheaply and quickly. So the Russians took the Su-27 and put a new body around it. Hence the very similar dimensions, wide spread out engines and so forth. Without modern jets Russia just can not claim to be a superpower and Russia really wants to be seen as one.

EDIT: Also to scam the Indians out of money. That was a key part as well.

Honestly, if Su-57 is a fith-generation aircraft, then so are Eurofighter, Rafale and Gripen. All of them have some stealth features and actually S-ducks, AESA radars and proper sensor fusion.

The 30 minute estimate is basically from the time the actual fighting starts. It is really not that crazy. As in time starts when a drone spots the Russian soldier. It then takes time for the FPV drone or whatever to arrive and then actual find the soldier again and attack him. 30minutes for that is realistic. Also it is not life span, but becoming a casulty. So being so insured that you can no longer fight is also an option.

Otherwise this would be insane. The actively fought over front is something like 500km long. Even if you have only a soldier for every km, you would see losses of 24,000 soldiers every day.

Russia is also would have lost 654,000 people due to “natural” population change according to official Russian statistics. They currently do not mainly due to Central Asian migrants coming to Russia to earn more money. However the Central Asian economies are doing better and it might well end up with Russia not being as rich in the near future. There also seems to be a trend to look for other destinations as well.

RCH155, Skynex, IRIS-T SLM and so forth come to mind. There are also a lot of drones from outside Ukraine, which are donated to them for testing and improvements. SMAP/T-NG is also going to see service in Ukraine first.

The zone where FPV drones are being used is about 20-30km wide. However they are launched within that zone. Meaning the range of the cheap models is about that of a 105mm gun. The key here is that those are no longer the cheap drones ordered from Wish, but specialized to withstand jamming and the like. Therefore the cost per drone has gone up a lot. They are still cheap enough to be extremely common, but a 105mm shell is very realistically a tenth of the price of a low end FPV drone. They also do not work all the time. There are reports from Ukraine, that an old Leopard1 tank withstood over 30 FPV hits and is still going for example.

A 105mm shell has over 2kg of explosive in it. A small FPV drone usually has less then 0.5kg of explosive. This means you can shell people in dug in positions or buildings and actually cause some damage. This is especially true since shells are cheaper then drones. The howitzer is also light, which means a lot of vehicles can easily move it around.

Other way around. Russia attacked a Ukrainian grain shipment.

Also no that would be dumb to attack Russian grain shipments. Currently the Russians have a huge issue producing food due to diesel shortages, which makes the harvest basically impossible. Russia selling their grain abroad would lower their own reserves making food shortages more likely.

The US is rarely invading countries. Mostly it is just bombing or a fairly small special operation, but not a full scale invasion. The two large scale invasion of this century namely Iraq and Afghanistan ended up both being failures for the US on a strategic level.

A shorter war and a less destroyed Russia… You probably see the issue.

You need fuel to drive a tank to the front line and that is a bit of a problem due to some smoking issues in Russia.

1.4million casualties…

In 2024 Russia was the fourth largest oil consumer after the US, China and India. So this is just great!

It is just crazy that Russian casualties are 1% of their entire population, not including the occupied parts of Ukraine.

The recruitment from Moscow is much lower. It is the richest city in the country, so they do not need the soldier contracts that badly and Putin does not want to piss them off. As in it is easier to storm the Kremlin, when you are in Moscow already.

To be fair, when the refineries close to me would be burning and I drove an ICE car, I would fill up too.

and this is were things start to get interesting. Russia is the largest country in the world and that means they need to transport everything over huge distances. With less diesel it is going to be hard to fuel trucks. So last mile delivery is going to become a problem. Not in Moscow of cause as it is the capital and will always be treated better, but we probably see empty shelves in far out villages soon.

The Soviets produced a lot of them and I doubt that they will be used in an air-to-air role due to being too short ranged. The advantage of them is that they have their own seeker, so even the Houthis managed to use them as a ground based air defence system, as they do not need radars or anything like that.

Ukraine said that Russia has had 27 operable Tu-22M left in 2023. They lost seven after that claim. Also the main factory working on bombers has been hit.

and 160km longer