- An expert said the Russian air force is being depleted through overuse in Ukraine.
- The arrival of Ukraine's F-16s could worsen the problem, wrote Rand's Michael Bohnert.
- Ukraine says it urgently needs F-16s to reduce Russia's air dominance.
Russia's fighter planes are malfunctioning because of overuse, handing Ukraine a potential advantage in its air battles against the Russian air force, an expert said.
In an article for Defense News, Michael Bohnert, an engineering expert at the Rand Corporation think tank, said that Russia's warplanes are running out of "aircraft life".
"Overuse of these aircraft is also costing Russia as the war drags on," he wrote, saying that by his calculations as many as 57 Russian planes, many repurposed Soviet-era machines, may have been lost because they broke down since the start of the war.
That's in addition to UK intelligence figures, which suggest around 130 of the estimated 900 planes in Russia's air force deployed in Ukraine have crashed or been shot down during the war.
Bohnert writes that because many of the aircraft are reaching the limit of their 3,000 hours of flight time, the problem could worsen.
"To make up for it, they'll have to procure more aircraft, increase maintenance, reduce operations, or accept a smaller force — or some combination of those," he said.
He said that the delivery of F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine by its Western allies, which has been delayed by bureaucracy, could damage Russia's air force even more.
"As the VKS [Russian air force] devotes a greater share of its dwindling force to countering those, it will have fewer aircraft left to support Russian ground operations," he wrote. "VKS fighters in the sky will also be less capable, stemming from two years of overuse."
But not all experts share Bohnert's conclusions. British think tank International Institute for Strategic Studies in a report said that Russia retained the capacity to rapidly add to its aircraft supplies from its aeronautical factories, potentially meaning old aircraft can be quickly replaced, and its overall strength in the air had not significantly diminished.
In the early weeks of the conflict, some analysts believed that Russia would be able to establish rapid control of Ukrainian air space, with its air force more sophisticated than and bigger than Ukraine's. But effective Ukrainian air defenses meant that Russia was unable to do so.
As it seeks to retake territory from Russia in its counteroffensive, Ukraine has been requesting F-16s from its Western allies that it says would help tip the air battle in its favor.