s2

s2 @ 12:31 pm: On July 8, Ukraine’s Air Force announced it had shot down a Russian Su-35 in the eastern sector. Hours later, Ukraine’s Third Army Corps posted drone footage of the aircraft falling in a flat spin, wrapped in fire, then burning on the ground in its area of responsibility.

Russian sources didn’t dispute the loss. Russian military bloggers, including the well-followed Fighterbomber channel, said the pilot ejected and survived, though Ukraine hasn’t independently confirmed that part.

What Ukraine has not said, publicly, is how the aircraft actually died.

Every detail about the ambush itself, the three-aircraft formation, the Patriot battery, which weapon actually fired, comes from Russian military Telegram channels trying to explain their own loss, not from a Ukrainian after-action report.

So, Ukraine confirmed the kill. Russia grudgingly confirmed the embarrassment. Everything that happened in between remains classified, disputed, or living inside Telegram’s natural habitat of half-facts, bravado, and men with call signs like Fighterbomber.

Here’s the version that’s circulating, sourced to Russian channels including Fighterbomber and a blogger known as Voivode, and picked up by outlets translating and compiling the claims.

One Ukrainian F-16, the bait, flew low toward the front, flying a profile that looked exactly like a Ukrainian jet setting up to drop guided bombs on Russian positions; the kind of mission the Su-35 has been sent to intercept for months.

Two more F-16s reportedly sat higher, out of the Russian pilot’s immediate view, armed with AIM-120 AMRAAMs.

Somewhere behind all three, a Ukrainian Patriot battery had allegedly moved to within roughly 60 kilometers of the front line, close enough to get real eyes on Russian-controlled airspace with its radar.

The Su-35 pilot did the thing he’d apparently done successfully many times before. He moved to intercept the low-flying jet. And once he committed to that intercept, the geometry of the fight quietly stopped being what he thought it was.

Fighterbomber himself, in a message laced with the kind of profanity you’d expect from a man explaining why his side just lost, put it about as honestly as a Russian source ever will. “Three aircraft plus a Patriot against one of ours,” he wrote.

Every version of this story eventually snags on the same question: Did an F-16 kill the Su-35 with an air-to-air missile, or did the Patriot battery on the ground do it?

Some of the reporting says Patriot provided “target illumination” for the F-16s, and I want to slow down on that phrase because it’s not technically accurate.

The older generation of radar-guided missiles, the semi-active radar homing weapons like the original AIM-7 Sparrow, needed the shooter’s own radar locked onto the target and continuously radiating a steady beam for the entire time of flight.

The missile’s seeker wasn’t smart enough to find the target on its own… It just listened for the shooter’s radar energy bouncing off the target and steered itself toward the strongest reflection, which meant the launching aircraft was chained to that target the whole way in, unable to maneuver hard or break its own lock without the missile going stupid.

That continuous beam is what “illumination” traditionally means in the strict engineering sense; a persistent, dedicated radar painting one target for one missile’s entire flight.

AMRAAM broke that chain on purpose.

It’s an active radar homing weapon, meaning it carries its own miniature radar transmitter in the nose. For most of the flight, the missile is just navigating by inertial guidance, dead reckoning based on where the shooter’s fire-control computer calculated the target would be, occasionally refined by a data-link update from the launching jet if the target maneuvers.

Only in the final seconds, at a range Western fighter pilots call “pitbull,” does the missile’s own onboard radar switch on, find the target itself, and guide home independently.

Nobody has to illuminate anything for it at that point. It’s hunting on its own.

Which is why Patriot handing over a usable weapons solution isn’t as simple as it sounds. There’s a real difference between a search track, good enough to tell you something’s out there and roughly where, and a fire-control quality track, precise enough in range, bearing, and closure rate to actually compute a valid missile launch solution.

Patriot’s engagement radar is plenty capable of the second kind for its own interceptors, but handing that exact fire-control-grade data to an F-16’s weapons computer over a tactical data link, in a form the jet’s systems can actually use to generate its own AMRAAM launch parameters, is a nontrivial integration problem; not a given just because both systems are on the same Link-16 network.

It’s far more likely Patriot supplied Ukraine’s broader air-defense network with early warning and a rough vector, cueing the F-16 crews on where to point their own radars and climb into position, after which the fighters closed the loop themselves with their own onboard sensors before taking the shot.

That’s a valuable contribution… But it’s a different job than being the missile’s actual guidance source.

But don’t write Patriot off as just a spotter, because it has real teeth of its own. The PAC-2 GEM-T interceptor Ukraine fields is specifically built to engage aircraft, not only cruise and ballistic missiles, and Ukraine has run this exact play before, moving a battery dangerously close to the front, sitting it quiet under emissions control so Russian sensors can’t find it, switching the radar on only once a Russian aircraft commits to an engagement, firing fast, and then displacing before anyone can retaliate.

If that’s what happened here, the bait F-16 wasn’t luring the Su-35 toward a fighter at all. It was luring the Russian jet into a predetermined box where a ground-based SAM battery had already done its homework on the altitude, the geometry, and the timing.

My honest read, and it’s a lean rather than a conclusion, is that an AMRAAM off one of the covering F-16s is slightly more likely, based on how the two top-cover jets are described and the way the Patriot role gets framed as a sensor rather than an explicit shooter.

But I want to be straight with you. The public evidence doesn’t settle this. And it won’t be settled by burning wreckage, by a Telegram post, or by an aviation blog’s confident headline. It gets settled by missile fragments, radar logs, a cockpit recording, or an actual Ukrainian operational statement, none of which currently exist in public.

Regardless, here’s why I think the credit question, satisfying as it would be to answer, is actually the less interesting part of this story.

Ukraine appears to have studied a standard Russian habit: Spot a Ukrainian strike aircraft, scramble or vector an Su-35, use its superior altitude and missile range to force the Ukrainian jet away before it can drop its weapons.

That pattern has worked for Russia for months, which is exactly what made it exploitable. Ukraine merely needed to understand the Su-35 pilot’s decision cycle well enough to write the script he’d follow, then place the shooters, real or decoy, exactly where that script would lead him.

The old picture of air combat is two fighters finding each other with their own radars and killing each other with their own missiles, a clean duel between two similar machines.

What Ukraine appears to have run instead spreads that single engagement across a network.

One aircraft acts as bait. Two more sit as the hidden teeth. A ground radar feeds everyone a better picture than any single platform could build alone.

Russia’s best fighter may have found itself fighting three F-16s, a Patriot radar, and Ukraine’s entire ground-control network, all at once, several seconds before he understood any of that was happening.

Ukraine can’t afford to trade F-16s against Su-35s one for one. It has too few of the former and Russia has too many of the latter. What it can apparently do is build a temporary, local pocket where several Ukrainian systems gang up on a single Russian aircraft, then dissolve that pocket the instant the shot is taken.

Who cares if that’s not a fair fight? It’s a smarter one.