Destroyed A-50 Over Krasnodar: Ukraine Hits AWACS at 250+ km

February 23, 2024November 28, 2025

A few hours ago, news broke that the Ukrainian Armed Forces destroyed A-50 over Krasnodar — another long-range radar detection aircraft. First came rumors, then confirmations appeared in enemy social networks.

Our military held a pause, and a bit later it became clear what caused it. They waited for objective data on the fate of the aircraft they managed to hit. As we remember, last time when an A-50 went down, an Il-22 flying command center also took a hit alongside it. Despite the damage and the ship commander’s death, the Il-22 still managed to land at Anapa airport. Today our military decided to wait for confirmation that the A-50 actually crashed, and as soon as they got it — they immediately gave official confirmation:

Unlike the previous “deceased” that crashed into the sea near Berdyansk, this one managed to stay airborne for some time and headed toward its own shore. Admittedly, it managed to fly quite far, and that’s precisely why our military couldn’t immediately find out whether the aircraft made it to some airfield or repeated its predecessor’s fate. As it turned out — everything’s in order, the flying radar doesn’t fly anymore, because an A-50 aircraft takes over a hundred tons of fuel, and when it met the surface, a large barbecue appeared there.

The Show in the Sky

Several more videos appeared online from locals who watched the show in the sky and commented on what was happening. Actually, from the show itself, everyone already saw that an aircraft was flying in the night sky and methodically firing off heat traps, and a missile hit one of the traps. The time from the explosion flash to the explosion sound — 52.42 seconds. Everyone can independently multiply this by the speed of sound to determine the distance from the observer to the explosion site.

From the crash site to the nearest point on the front line, about 230 kilometers. Obviously, if we’re talking about a heavy, ground-based air defense complex, they won’t bring it closer than 20-30 km to the front line, where barrel artillery can reach, and in that case we already get 250 km of missile flight to the aircraft. Moreover, the video shows that the aircraft fired off heat traps for quite a long time and very intensively, which means it had grounds for this. Somehow it’s hard to believe that it easily caught missiles flying behind it at speeds of several Machs.

Two Open Questions

There are two open questions we don’t have answers to. First — what did the A-50 detect that made it rush home, covering the sky with heat traps? The second question flows from the first: what could shoot down an enemy aircraft at a distance of 250+ kilometers, given that Patriot missiles fly up to 200 km? Everyone can draw their own conclusions, and we’ll only note that this doesn’t look much like a Patriot, either by distance or by the aircraft’s reaction.

Orcs’ Fairy Tales

The Orcs* stayed true to their repertoire and started telling stories about how their own air defense systems shot down the aircraft. You can understand them, since such an explanation fits into russian propaganda narratives, which claim that the Ukrainian Armed Forces fight with outdated weapons and technically cannot accomplish many things. Sink a missile cruiser? Shoot down a newest aircraft? Strike a gunpowder factory? For such situations, they’ve long had a worked-out standard system of explanations: “friendly fire” or “smoked in the wrong place.”

In this case, such a version becomes completely inevitable. After all, if you tell the public that the Ukrainian Armed Forces knocked it down at a distance of 250+ kilometers, then the question arises: what accomplished this and how could such a thing happen in principle?

The enemy aircraft wasn’t flying along the northern coast of the Azov Sea, as the previously destroyed A-50, but was patrolling over its own Azov Sea shore, cutting circles over Rostov Oblast and Krasnodar Krai. This means conclusions from the previous disaster were drawn after all, and they pulled the patrol zone 100 kilometers back from the front line. That is, the ruSSian military understand this wasn’t “friendly fire,” but they can’t come up with a more or less satisfactory explanation for civilians.

Work for psychiatrists

For this reason, this time, psychiatrists rather than OSINT analysts should study the Orcs’ versions. Here write ruSSians:

Translated: The Americans learned to give the command to launch our air defenses without the operator’s participation. They hacked the protocol and picked up the ciphers. No comments.

We decided to help the russians and came up with a more plausible version: Varlons or Membartsi destroyed the A-50. They confused the russian aircraft with the starship “Enterprise” thanks to the characteristic “pancake” over the fuselage, after which they slammed it with a photon torpedo.

What Actually Happened

As in the previous case, the Ukrainian Armed Forces also don’t rush to tell “how this is achieved.” And the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ position is 100% justified. The version that appeared online today — they managed to shoot down the aircraft with an S-200 air defense system missile. But what actually brought down the A-50 is known only to the crew of the destroyed A-50 over Krasnodar, since they surely managed to precisely identify the missile.

*Orcs – a common term for Russians who support or participate in the armed aggression against Ukraine. Dehumanizing? Yes. Accurate? Also yes.