Article Summary – Russia’s S-70 Okhotnik was conceived as a stealthy loyal-wingman UAV to penetrate dense air defenses alongside fighters like the Su-57.
-Instead, one of the few prototypes was mysteriously shot down over Ukraine, then dissected by Kyiv’s intelligence services.
-Their teardown exposed a heavy reliance on Western microelectronics and highlighted how sanctions and low production runs are choking Moscow’s high-end drone ambitions.
-Built for a high-tech war against NATO, the large, expensive S-70 is ill-suited to the brutal, attritional drone fight in Ukraine, where cheap FPV quadcopters and mass-produced loitering munitions dominate.
-It’s a cautionary symbol of Russia’s stalled modernization drive.
Russia’s S-70 Okhotnik: Unmanned, Under-utilized, and Unlikely to Move Forward
The unmanned aerial combat vehicle (UAV) was a platform that came into existence long before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. UAVs were intended to fight a very different kind of war—high-end, against a peer adversary—not the kind of attritional fighting that Moscow is now locked in against Kyiv.
Russia’s S-70 Okhotnik, an Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle built by Sukhoi, is designed to fly alongside Russian combat aircraft.
The S-70 is one of Russia’s most ambitious attempts to build a stealthy strike and reconnaissance aircraft that can survive in contested airspace, traveling ahead of manned aircraft.
Compared to most combat drones, the S-70 is large.
With a wingspan of about 19 meters and a takeoff weight estimated in the 20-ton range, the S-70 can carry a large payload. And like other stealth aircraft, the UAV stores its fuel and other payload internally, which aids stealth.
Shot Out of the Sky
Late last year, the drone made headlines following its shootdown by Russian forces over Ukraine. A Russian fighter—possibly a Su-57 Felon—shot down the S-70 over the skies near Donetsk Province, in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region. The S-70 wreckage was subsequently captured by Ukrainian forces after being filmed falling out of the sky.
Why exactly Russian forces shot down the S-70 is unanswered, and it will in all likelihood remain a mystery.
One possibility is that Russia’s hand was forced by an errant S-70 flying toward Ukrainian forces. Given the S-70’s emphasis on radar cross-section reduction, Russia may have sought to prevent the S-70 from falling into Ukrainian and, eventually, American hands.
Speaking to Air & Space Forces Magazine, a former Pentagon official said that the recovered drone, which was apparently relatively intact, could provide “tremendous insight” into the S-70, which has not yet entered full-scale production. It could also hint at how advanced Russian stealth technology is.
Further, the official explained, the recovered drone could provide some clues into how much insight America’s adversaries gleaned from the 2011 shoot-down of a U.S. Air Force RQ-170 drone over Iran in 2011.
Iran supplied Russia with schematics for its Shahed drone, a design Russia tweaked, renaming its variant the Geran-2.
That official’s comments proved to be prescient.
A Plethora of Western Components
Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence Directorate, known by its Ukrainian abbreviation GRU, said it found many Western-sourced components in the downed S-70 drone. “Analysis of the structure of the Russian S-70 ‘Okhotnik’ UAV, which was shot down on October 5, 2024, near Kostyantynivka in Donetsk Oblast, showed that, despite sanctions, the aggressor state used components manufactured by Western companies to create this weapon,” GRU wrote on their Telegram channel.
“In particular,” GRU added, “microelectronics and other technological components manufactured by Analog Devices, Texas Instruments, and Xilinx-AMD (USA), Infineon Technologies (Germany), and STMicroelectronics (Switzerland) were found in the Russian Okhotnik.”
Although there was some speculation that the S-70 had been flying in tandem with a manned Russian aircraft in a Collaborative Combat Aircraft-like teaming, one aerospace analyst pushed back, saying that while China has a robust loyal wingman program, Russia does not.
While sources differ slightly on how many S-70s Russia has built, it is unlikely that more than a small handful, perhaps five or so aircraft, have been produced.
It is also worth noting that the S-70 that was shot down may have been built before Europe and the United States levied sanctions against Russia following Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Curtailed Modernization Push
Though the S-70 Okhotnik was intended to augment Russian pilots’ capabilities and boost combat effectiveness, the unmanned drone has largely failed to close the yawning gap between Western and Russian UACVs.
Though the S-70 has demonstrated some positive qualities, particularly what is anticipated to be a low radar cross-section, many questions about its stealth characteristics, range, payload capacity, and ability to work autonomously remain unanswered—and may remain so for quite some time to come.
The War in Ukraine and Russia’s Defense Industrial Base
The war in Ukraine has seen a greater emphasis on unmanned aerial platforms than during any other conflict. However, the UAVs that have defined this conflict—small, cheap, first-person-view drones—are cheap and expendable, bearing no resemblance to large, expensive UAVs such as the S-70 Okhotnik, which was not designed for high-intensity, attritional conflict.
The S-70 is poorly suited to the Ukraine War, given its large size, the comparatively sophisticated technologies that went into its design, and very low production numbers. The future of the S-70 seems relatively meager.
S-70: What Happens Next?
Russia’s S-70 Okhotnik was built to fight a completely different kind of war than the one Moscow now finds itself mired in.
Given the Russian emphasis on prosecuting their invasion of Ukraine, primarily a land-based conflict, it is difficult to imagine UAVs like the S-70 gaining renewed production emphasis in the future.
About the Author: Caleb Larson
Caleb Larson is an American multiformat journalist based in Berlin, Germany. His work covers the intersection of conflict and society, focusing on American foreign policy and European security. He has reported from Germany, Russia, and the United States. Most recently, he covered the war in Ukraine, reporting extensively on the war’s shifting battle lines from Donbas and writing on the war’s civilian and humanitarian toll. Previously, he worked as a Defense Reporter for POLITICO Europe. You can follow his latest work on X.
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