The Best Russian Aircraft for NATO Is the Su-57 Russia’s Su-57 is the best thing flying in the Russian Air Force, if you’re NATO. Sixteen years after its first flight, Moscow has roughly twenty of them in combat units, a new configuration with nearly every batch, and one confirmed foreign buyer. Every rouble poured into it is a rouble not spent on aircraft that actually threaten anyone. I call it the Spackle Bird. Look at almost any close-up photo of the jet and you’ll see what looks like filler smeared over panel gaps, seams and fastener heads. It isn’t applied cleanly, either. On a stealth aircraft, that surface finish is supposed to be the whole point. On the Su-57, it looks like a drywall patch job. Sixteen years, about twenty jets The Su-57 first flew on 29 January 2010, and after sixteen years Russia has roughly 20 in frontline service. Counting prototypes and test airframes, 44-plus have been built, about ten of them test aircraft, several of which are now retired or on display. The combat fleet is tiny. Ukraine’s Militarnyi reported that only 16 had reached combat units between 2019 and September 2025, rising to 18 with the February 2026 batch. This week’s delivery reportedly added two more. For the largest country on earth, that is a boutique collection, not an air force. And the collection keeps getting hurt: DateWhat happened 23 Jul 2026A jet widely reported as a Su-57 crashed on takeoff near Kubinka; Moscow blamed a “technical malfunction” and never named the type. Ukrainian sources claim Russian air defense shot it down. Spring 2026Ukrainian drones reached Su-57s at Shagol in the Urals. Jun 2024Drones damaged two Su-57s at Akhtubinsk. Dec 2019One of the first serial jets crashed in Khabarovsk Krai before the military even received it. Jun 2014Prototype T-50-5 suffered an engine fire after landing; it was rebuilt rather than written off. At a reported $100 to $120 million apiece, every one of those losses hurts a fleet this small. A new version with every batch Nearly every time Russia takes delivery of Su-57s, they arrive in a different configuration. On 24 September 2026, UAC handed over the second batch of the year in what it called a “new technical configuration”, with changes to onboard systems and weapons. The February batch was also billed as a new configuration. Rostec didn’t even say how many jets were in the latest one. On top of the rolling batch changes, the family tree keeps branching: •Su-57: the baseline single-seat fighter. •Su-57E: the export model. •Twin-seat Su-57: now in flight testing, and slated to test a new AI combat system. •Su-57M / M1: the promised upgrade with next-generation engines, which Russia is still inching toward. Every configuration change means different parts, different tooling, different technical manuals and different training for the ground crews who keep the jets flying. When your batches are two to a handful of aircraft, you end up with a fleet where no two squadrons look quite alike. The U.S. upgrades aircraft too; the F-16 has gone through many production blocks. The difference is scale. Each F-16 block covered hundreds of airframes built to one standard. If Washington had changed the F-16 every ten jets, there would be hundreds of variants and a logistics nightmare. That is the path Russia is on with the Su-57. Stealth in name only Russia markets the Su-57 as fifth generation, but it performs more like a fourth-generation-plus-plus fighter with some stealth shaping. Public estimates put its frontal radar cross-section at 0.1 to 1.0 square meters, against roughly 0.0015 for an F-35A. That is a gap of several hundred times. The reasons are visible in any good photo: •Intakes: the ducts are short and fairly straight. Instead of hiding the engine faces with deep serpentine ducts like the F-22 and F-35, the Su-57 leans on radar blockers, and you can still see a lot of engine in there. •Exhausts: big, round, bare-metal nozzles on AL-41F1 engines, with no low-observable shaping or treatment. From the side and rear, the jet is a radar and infrared beacon. •Weapons: the Su-57 does have internal bays, but they are cramped and weapons integration has lagged. The jet is regularly seen with missiles on external pylons, and a pylon full of non-stealthy ordnance erases whatever the airframe shaping bought. •Surface finish: and then there’s the spackle. Low observability depends on tight tolerances and smooth, continuous surfaces. Hand-applied filler over gaps and fastener heads is the opposite of that. Almost nobody is buying The Su-57’s only export story is Algeria, and even that is murky. Two jets have reportedly been handed over, but Moscow has never officially named the buyer. Nobody outside the two governments knows whether they are the start of a real fleet or a pair of evaluation aircraft. Talk of a 12- to 14-jet order rests on Algerian TV claims and leaked documents, not deliveries. There is good reason for doubt. Algeria has been burned by Moscow before: in 2007 and 2008 it sent back its MiG-29SMTs over quality problems, reportedly airframes built with old, used components. Going from rejecting refurbished MiG-29s to buying Russia’s flagship stealth fighter is quite a leap. Two jets delivered looks as much like a face-saving gesture as a real sale. India walked away from the joint FGFA program years ago, and Moscow’s claims of other signed contracts still come with no named customers. That matters because Russian weapons programs live or die on exports. Russia builds a system well when foreign customers pay for the production line, and then its own forces take the overruns. •T-90 tank: for most of its life, the T-90 was an export success first. India alone operates on the order of a thousand, far more than Russia fielded before 2022. Even the T-90Ms reaching Russian units today are largely rebuilt older hulls, T-90As and converted T-72s, rather than new-build tanks. •BMPT Terminator: Algeria ordered a few hundred. Russia’s own inventory has been a handful. The Su-57 has no such customer base. Without a big foreign order to fund tooling and drive the unit cost down, Russia is paying full price for a hand-built fleet, and it can’t make that fleet large. A jet without a job, draining the ones that have one Russia still hasn’t settled what the Su-57 is for. Air superiority fighter? Multirole jet? Fighter-bomber? In Ukraine it has mostly served as an expensive missile truck, lobbing Kh-59 and Kh-69 cruise missiles from standoff range, a job a Su-34 or Su-35 can already do. After the drone strikes on its bases, Russia has reportedly kept it away from missions over Ukraine altogether. Meanwhile, the program eats money, engineers and factory time at Komsomolsk-on-Amur that could be turning out more Su-35s and Su-34s, the jets actually carrying Russia’s air war. Production is fragile too: an April 2026 fire gutted the KnAAZ workshop that makes the Su-57’s composite parts, which likely explains why this year’s second batch came so late. The long-term cost is worse than the price tag. A small fleet of hand-finished, batch-unique aircraft is a maintenance headache for decades. Spare parts don’t interchange cleanly, crews have to learn each configuration’s quirks, and every airframe on the ground is a large share of the whole force. Please, build more The F-22 entered U.S. service in 2005. Twenty-one years later, Russia’s answer is a hand-patched jet in tiny, mismatched batches. Others are overtaking it: on the same day Russia accepted its latest Su-57s, South Korea inducted the KF-21 Boramae into its air force, and Turkey’s KAAN has been flying since 2024. Countries that were never aerospace superpowers are moving faster than Moscow. So from NATO’s point of view, the Su-57 is a brilliant aircraft. It soaks up money that could buy proven fighters. It gives Russia a fleet too small to matter and too fussy to sustain. It sells to almost no one. Every Spackle Bird that rolls out of Komsomolsk-on-Amur is good news for the alliance. I hope they build more.

Liz Truss. "The Bank of England was set up by Tony Blair." 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 Bonkers, absolutely bonkers.

Betsy who? Wer sich heute Morgen fragt, warum es eigentlich keine Videos vom fulminanten Gegenbesuch des chinesischen Staatspräsidenten in den USA gibt – wo Trump doch im Mai in Peking in einem Traum aus Salutschüssen, Ehrengarde, Militärkapelle und fähnchenschwenkenden Kindern baden durfte –, sollte nicht etwa glauben, das Weiße Haus hätte für den hohen Gast nicht alle Register gezogen. Hat es. Bilder gab es trotzdem keine. Das lag an Betsy Klein. Betsy who? Betsy Klein ist Senior Reporter von CNN im Weißen Haus. Gestern hatte sie eigentlich Dienst. Das sah das Weiße Haus aber anders und ließ sie nicht rein. Kurzerhand solidarisierten sich die Kollegen der anderen TV-Stationen mit ihr. Und so kam es, dass gestern Mittag die teuren Kameras der US-amerikanischen TV-Sender nicht etwa auf Xi Jinping gerichtet waren, sondern auf die Kollegin Betsy, als sie endlich durch die Sicherheitsschleuse ging. Xi Jinping und der ganze schöne Begrüßungsporno wurden da zur Nebensache. Das Drama begann schon vergangenen Freitag: Trump hatte Medienvertreter von CNN, MS NOW und Politico in einem Anflug von Sonnenkönig-Allüren vor die Tür gesetzt. Bundesrichter Timothy Kelly, 2017 übrigens von Trump selbst nominiert, ordnete in der Nacht zu gestern dann an, den Journalisten aber mal zackig den Zugang zum Weißen Haus zurückzugeben. Betsy und Co. machten sich also gestern auf den Weg. Immerhin ging es um viel: Der chinesische Präsident ist schließlich nicht jeden Tag in der Hauptstadt. Nur rein kamen sie nicht. Das Weiße Haus ließ die Journalisten stundenlang draußen stehen, dem Politico-Kollegen wurde der Presseausweis gleich ganz abgenommen. Es brauchte einen weiteren Eilantrag der Medienhäuser und eine Frist des Gerichts. Erst kurz nach zwölf, wenige Minuten vor Ablauf dieser Frist, durfte Klein hinein. Später folgten ihre CNN-Kollegen und die Leute von Politico. Die Kameras, die Betsy beim Betreten des Weißen Hauses filmten, waren übrigens die einzigen „westlichen“, die an diesem Tag etwas zu tun hatten. Das Team vom Sender ABC, das für den Pool zuständig war – also für die gemeinsame Bildversorgung aller Sender, auch der europäischen –, legte beim ersten Termin von Trump und Xi demonstrativ die Kameras ab. Wegen Betsy und der Kollegen der beiden anderen Medien. So gibt es jetzt nur Fotos von Trump mit Xi im Glück. Das chinesische Staatsfernsehen hatte eh seine eigenen Leute dabei. ABC, CBS, NBC und, man lese und staune, Fox News hatten schon am Montag gemeinsam mit CNN erklärt, vorerst nicht mehr über Trump-Auftritte zu berichten. Gestern schrieb ich noch, keiner wüsste, ob die Kollegen beim nächsten Termin gleich wieder vor der Tür stehen. Die Antwort kam schneller als gedacht: Kurz vor dem Staatsbankett wurden Journalisten von CNN und MS NOW erneut nicht vorgelassen. Ob CNN seine Pool-Dienste wieder übernehmen darf, dazu schweigt das Weiße Haus. Heißt unterm Strich: Der Präsident, für den Fernsehbilder alles sind, hat sich seinen eigenen pompösen Staatsbesuch zerschossen – ganz ohne amerikanische Fernsehbilder. Chapeau. Im Oval Office witzelte Trump derweil, die Chinesen hätten das freundlichste Pressekorps. Er hat bekommen, was er wollte. Die Bilder davon, wie Xi Jinping die Stufen zum Weißen Haus hinaufschreitet, liefen gestern vor allem an einem Ort: im chinesischen Fernsehen. Und die ganze Welt kennt jetzt Betsy Klein. Das ist die Frau unten im Video von @LCI.

Incredible. First @SecMullinDHS claimed that @DHSgov identified 15,903 noncitizens on Nevada’s voter roll. Then DHS officials said, no no no, that’s just people we flagged, here’s the names of 185 people we KNOW aren’t citizens. All 185 were citizens. DHS got 100% wrong.

Your name is probably Ivan Blyatistov Cуkablyat or something like that. And you stole the image you use as a profile picture from the facebook account of the Danish businesswoman Dorte Ostergaard.

К вопросу о гражданской войне в Украине! "Не надо ломать комедию! В боях за Донецкий аэропорт и Дебальцево в 2014-2015 годах участвовали регулярные подразделения армии рф", - Z-пропагандист Дмитрий Стешин внезапно признал, что никакой «гражданской войны» на Донбассе не было.

It gets even dumber: after Trump said he was working on a MASSIVE DEAL to import potash fertilizer from Russian puppet state Belarus instead of Canada, Belarus says... they don't even have any fertilizer to send: "Even if we wanted to supply [potash] to other, Western markets, we simply do not have those volumes." thehill.com/policy/internati…

! Scoop ! We have obtained hundreds of thousands of files from inside the Kremlin-backed fintech company A7, supposedly set up as an alternative to the western SWIFT system. 1/3 Kremlin-backed forgery scheme moved $6.9bn through global banks ft.com/content/3848a4ad-1426… via @ft