Russia's celebration over hitting Ukraine's "Su-25 jet" proves short lived

Russian military bloggers boasted Thursday that Moscow's forces destroyed a Ukrainian air force Sukhoi Su-25 attack jet in southern Ukraine, but the aircraft was likely a decoy, some war observers have assessed.

Russian Telegram channel Dneprovsky Rubezh, and other accounts, published a video that allegedly captured a Russian "Lancet" suicide drone strike on what looks like a Ukrainian Sukhoi Su-25 at the Dolgintsevo airfield near Kryvyi Rih in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. However, some observers said the footage contains many signs that indicate that the destroyed "jet" was a decoy.

Ukraine's military has used decoys throughout the war to lure Russian forces to waste their resources into destroying them. Ukraine's largest steelmaker Metinvest told the Financial Times in September that the firm had supplied more than 250 sophisticated decoy weapons and pieces of equipment to Ukrainian troops across the frontline.