A Resistance Group Landed a Drone on Top of a Russian Jet. The Footage Is Incredible.
We still don’t know for 100 percent sure if a Belarussian opposition group managed to damage a valuable Russian A-50 Mainstay aircraft using explosive-laden commercial drones to blasts its fuselage and huge pancake-shaped radar antennas.
But it’s looking more likely now that the Belarussian resistance group, known as BYPOL, has released footage of it landing a copter-drone directly on the aircraft’s huge Vega Shmel-M (“Bumblee”) radar dish, while parked near the Belarussian capital of Minsk, without anyone appearing to notice.
The video shows a quadcopter drone as it approaches the airbase on a sunny winter day, its rotors whining, and leisurely comes to a landing atop the radar dome of an A-50. The intrusion produces no apparent reaction, and the drone eventually lift off and flies away.
A post by BYPOL on the Telegram social media platform states:
“Belarusian partisans for 2 weeks with the help of civilian drones purchased in the store, conducted aerial reconnaissance at Machulishchy air base. During one of the successful reconnaissance operations, the drone not only flew into the protected area of the specified airfield, flew near the Russian military aircraft AWACS A-50U, but even landed on its radar station (‘dish’). So, how did the regime’s vaunted counter-drone system perform, the development and production of which tens of millions of rubles of budget funds were spent? The answer is obvious—not at all. And was information about these incidents reported to the self-appointed ruler? Of course not.”
The video therefore shows one of several claimed reconnaissance flights—not the kinetic attack against the Mainstay aircraft the group claims took place on Sunday (February 26) using two DJI quadcopter drones, each armed with just under a half-pound (.44 lbs) of TNT-equivalent explosives enhanced with roughly 200 metal balls of shrapnel each.
Earlier on Tuesday, February 28, The Drive obtained Planet Labs satellite imagery of the airbase that day that showed an intact A-50 at Machulishchy without discernible major damage—implying if a kinetic attack took place, its results were too limited to be apparent in satellite imagery.
Satellite Photos from MAXAR that show the Russian A-50 Mainstay at the Minsk airfield. There is no visible damage from these images but that does not mean there isn't any. Russia moved the aircraft to a new parking spot. The main take away is the aircraft was not destroyed. pic.twitter.com/ay22klKVXT
— NWE War Reports (@NWEWarReports) February 28, 2023
To be fair, without fuel or armament on landed A-50, there would likely be limited external effects from a blast equivalent to that of a small hand grenade. However, a blast might still cause meaningful damage if it manages to shred the sensitive internal electronics of the radar or satellite uplink just under the skin; or cause melting of internal electronic wiring. A discolored patch on the radar dome’s front edge visible in the post-strike satellite photo isn’t evident in the new, pre-strike footage.
Overall, if the group managed to literally land a drone on top of the aircraft during a scouting run, it seems a lot more credible that they were able to repeat that feat using two similar DJI drones with light explosive payloads. Such an attack might still cause meaningful damage, even if it’s not externally obvious.
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Russia’s ‘Mainstay’ Eyes in the Sky
Like the U.S. Air Force’s E-3 Sentry and Navy’s E-2 Hawkeye airborne early warning and control aircraft, the Beriev A-50 has a huge ‘pizza-dish’ radar-dome mounted atop its fuselage, which provides 360-degree radar coverage for hundreds of miles around it. Based on the big Il-76 four-engine transport jet, the A-50 has a flight crew of five, supplemented by 10 specialists who operate a host of sensors, radios, and datalinks to coordinate air and ground forces in response to what its sensors can see.
Russia has only a small fleet of 16 A-50 aircraft, which are in high demand to support wartime operations. Only seven of the Soviet-era jets have been modernized to the A-50U model, which has liquid crystal displays, a satellite uplink and longer range radios (250 miles UHF, 1,242 miles HF), the improved Bumblebee-M radar, a crew lounge and kitchen, and increased fuel capacity.
The Bumblebee-M is better at detecting low-flying and stealth aircraft, and has detection range boosted generally by 20 to 33 percent: claimed capable of detecting fighters and warships at 250 miles and launches of land-based missiles at over 600 miles. It can track 300 object simultaneously, and has datalinks to coordinate 40 intercepts at a time.
A successor, the A-100 equipped with the Vega Premier AESA-class radar, has been stalled in development for years with two prototypes built, in part hampered by inability to obtain components due to sanctions.
Airborne early warning radars particularly have a better vantage than ground-based radars for detecting low-flying aircraft that would otherwise be masked by terrain—a tactic Ukrainian pilots rely upon to close with Russian aircraft equipped with much better radars.
The A-50 over Belarus, though unarmed, has thus constituted a persistent menace orbiting for many hours at a time on the northern flank of Ukraine’s air defenses as they come under daily attack by drones and cruise missiles.
The aircraft’s systems help locate Ukrainian surface-to-air missile sites for attack, and arranging long-range air-to-air missile attacks by Russian MiG-31 and Su-35 jets on Ukrainian fighters trying to defend western Ukraine. Overall, support from A-50s has further reinforced the substantial technical edge of Russian fighters in air-to-air combat.
Therefore, damaging mission-critical systems on a single A-50U would represent a blow degrading Russia’s overall air effort.
It also could imply a larger, persistent threat to other Russian aircraft based in Belarus, which may force the diversion of valuable ground-based air defenses or electronic warfare specialists to protect the base. It could also generally impede the tempo of flight operations that—judging from what we see in the video—was deemed completely safe from attack.
Though Belarus’s military has not directly joined Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, its longtime ruling strongman, Alexander Lukashenko, has permitted Russian ground and air forces to train and stage from there. Russian forces from Belarus led the western prong of Russia’s ill-fated drive towards Ukraine’s capital of Kyiv in the first weeks of the war, supported by warplanes flying from Belarussian airbases.
Since Russia withdrew those troops from that disastrous campaign at the end of March 2022, there haven’t been more cross-border ground offensives originating from Belarus. Lukashenko has also resisted pressure from Moscow to directly join hostilities with his country’s small military. But the Russian air component in Belarus remains active—including the A-50 jet.
However, since a rigged election in 2020, former members of Belarus’s law enforcement agencies formed an activist group called BYPOL. Initially focused on exposing crimes and corruption through its social media presence, in March 2022 the group announced it had participated in successful sabotage of railways used by Russian forces.
While BYPOL’s new video doesn’t confirm a successful kinetic attack on an A-50, it makes BYPOL’s claim that one took place seem more likely given the apparent lack of security near the A-50. It also suggests Belarussians are willing to risk their lives approaching military bases with short-range commercial drones in a bid to trip up Russia’s war machine as it continues prosecuting its war with Ukraine.
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