Face the facts, Russia is the new India. All good developments are always in the future of the future!
The Russian fighter aircraft park is mostly less than a decade old. The remainder is like two decades old. In the case of the interceptors they were modernized with electronics upgrades. This is much better than most NATO countries including the US. The Russian Air Force has taken in hundreds of new aircraft over the past two decades. And this is visible in the Ukrainian conflict against Ukrainian airframes of the Soviet era. Russian sensors can severely outrange those in Ukrainian fighter aircraft, and their missiles can also outrange them, not to mention the radar guided missiles being fully fire and forget.
The truth is, in two years of conflict, the Ukrainians have
zero reported air to air kills of Russian fighters with their MiG-29 and Su-27.
The Su-57 would make no difference as it cannot possibly do better than that.
Now you can argue about the lack of 5th generation aircraft. But that will also be solved eventually.
Russia won't be building fighters that won't be maintainable in the long run in the tens or hundreds like the US has been doing. That is for sure.
The F-22 is a failed program where due to lack of investment in aircraft upgrades and lack of production it will likely manage to be taken out of service sooner than the aircraft it was supposed to replace. The F-15.
As for the F-35 all fighters prior to Block 3 cannot be upgraded to that variant because the airframe is structurally weak and was only reinforced in later lots. So Block 1 & 2 are unable to meet the criteria of a g-limit of +9. Block 1&2 also lack ground attack capabilities. The Russians caught a similar structural issue in the Su-57 in the prototype stage and fixed it. All production Su-57 aircraft are capable of ground attacks from the start. That is the difference between running a regular program and using concurrency.
And now we have talks about how F-35 Block 3 aircraft won't able to be upgraded to Block 4. Because the older engine won't be able to power the electronics in it and it lacks cooling power.
I would say Russia's Air Force fighter procurement has proven itself as quite efficient thus far.
Where the Russian procurement has failed is in the fighter bomber part. While the Su-34 proved itself just fine in the Syrian conflict, it just isn't economically viable to use it as a frontline fighter bomber in non-permissive environments. The Su-25 is just plain obsolete. So these aircraft will quite likely be replaced with drones eventually. By the Sukhoi Hunter aka Okhotnik, Kronstadt Thunder aka Molnya, or one of other drones being worked on.
What I’m talking about is the ability to neutralize the primary weapons that impede their success, i. e., Ukrainian artillery (including rockets), and tactical air-defenses.
They are changing the software of the Tor and Pantsir to more reliably intercept large caliber rockets, and they have the Lancet to destroy the shorter ranged ones. More recent versions of the Lancet have proven themselves to work at depths of up to 80 km behind the lines. Which means they can hit even mid range air defenses and a lot of the long range artillery provided they can spot it. They modernized more Smerch systems to Tornado-S. They put the Coalition into serial production. The Ukrainians have even spotted the Coalition operating close to the frontline already.
