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Oleksandr Oksanchenko-a famous air-show pilot-died in the shoot-down.

It’s also possible Ukrainians air-defenses mistook it for a Russian plane. It’s possible the Russians shot it down with a long-range surface-to-air missile. 25, an Su-27 exploded while patrolling over Kyiv. One of the first losses also was the most tragic for the Ukrainian people. The Ukrainian air force has lost at least seven Su-27s-and at least five pilots-in the past 11 months. If all 57 were flyable, it might imply Kyiv had restored every single available airframe. And by 2016, at least one analyst counted 57 Ukrainian Su-27s with confirmable “bort” numbers painted on their noses. It’s possible as many as three dozen unflyable airframes were in storage. The Russian invasion of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014 motivated Kyiv to expand the Su-27 fleet. Twenty-three years later, as few as 24 were in active service. Ukraine inherited 74 then-new Su-27s when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Just how many Su-27s the Ukrainian air force had in service before the wider war is a matter of intensive debate. There’s no obvious outside source for replacement airframes. That there are no Su-27s in the inventories of Ukraine’s allies makes every one of the jets extremely valuable. They patrol for Russian planes, fly high-stakes bombing sorties and even fire American-made anti-radar missiles at Russian air-defenses.