Ukraine’s ‘Viking’ Su-27 Pilot Said After Surviving Three Years of Combat Against Superior Russian Forces
David Axe
January 04, 2025
Trench Art
“I was afraid to miss the war,” a bearded fighter pilot with the call sign “Viking” said in a recent Ukrainian air force video. Viking flies supersonic Sukhoi Su-27s with the 39th Tactical Aviation Brigade, nominally based in Zhytomyr Oblast in northern Ukraine but presently dispersed across Ukraine in an attempt to avoid Russian bombardment.
Ukraine has around 40 of the Soviet-vintage fighters left after losing at least 15 in combat since Russian widened its war on Ukraine in February 2022. The twin-engine Su-27s are the air force’s heavyweight fighter-bombers. They fly air-defense patrols, launch anti-radar missiles and lob precision glide-bombs in dramatic low-level raids.
Viking rushed to the 39th TAB’s base in the early hours of the Feb. 24, 2022 invasion. The next morning, he was in the air in his Su-27. Thirty-five months later, he’s still flying and fighting.
Ukrainian air-defenses reeled from the initial onslaught in February 2022. Ground-based missile batteries struggled to redeploy away from the fast-changing front line. For a while, the Su-27s “were the only ones here,” Viking recalled.
Russian air force warplanes came low, at night: Sukhoi Su-34s and Su-35s. “Our sights are two generations behind them, our missiles are behind theirs,” Viking explained. To have any chance against the newer Russian jets, the Ukrainian Su-27s had to “get close.” Early on, most 39th TAB pilots flew multi-hour patrols every night. “We held them back,” Viking said. But the risk was enormous.
Russian air-defenses hounded the 39th TAB. The Russian air force’s best missile batteries “work at a crazy range.” Shorter-range Buk batteries are highly mobile and might move tens of miles in hours to ambush Ukrainian jets. Viking said he dodged six Russian missiles during one memorable sortie at the start of the war. As the conflict ground into 2023, everything changed. The air force modified the Su-27s to launch U.S.-supplied munitions including High-Speed Anti-Radiation Missiles, Joint Direct Attack Munition GPS-guided bombs and Small Diameter Bomb glide munitions. “Soviet aircraft were able to fire American missiles,” Viking mused.
Employing these “incredible” munitions was the first positive experience of the war for Viking. One Su-27 can haul eight of the winged, 250-pound Small Diameter Bombs. “They are as smart as possible.”
Re-armed with the latest weapons, 39th TAB pilots can now fire on the Russians “farther from the front line” and greatly reduce their vulnerability. By 2024, the Russians were hitting more Ukrainian Su-27s on the ground in long-range rocket attacks than they were hitting in the air.
What happens next for Viking and his fellow Su-27 pilots is impossible to predict. Both sides are constantly innovating new tactics. New dangers develop all the time. And there’s no immediate sign of the war ending. “I get physically tired,” Viking conceded, “but morally I have to keep myself in good shape all the time.” “I am personally driven by the war.”
David Axe – Forbes Staff. Aerospace & Defense. He is a journalist, author and filmmaker based in Columbia, South Carolina. Axe founded the website War Is Boring in 2007 as a webcomic, and later developed it into a news blog. He enrolled at Furman University and earned a bachelor’s degree in history in 2000. Then he went to the University of Virginia to study medieval history before transferring to and graduating from the University of South Carolina with a master’s degree in fiction in 2004.