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The Russian bomber force faces many pressures, including the forced concentration of serviceable aircraft at Ukrainka airbase in the Russian Far East and, to a lesser degree, Olenya Airbase in the Kola Peninsula to avoid the worst of the threat posed by Ukrainian strike munitions. This dynamic has resulted in an exceedingly inefficient approach to employing bomber aircraft as launch platforms for cruise missiles. It is contributing to the rapid consumption of the finite service hours left on these almost exclusively Soviet-built airframes, engines, and other components. It has also likely disrupted maintenance, training, and other day-to-day activities.
Time will tell how the Russian Air Force will adapt to these dynamics in a post-war setting. The strike munition threat is unlikely to go away or be greatly dampened, not least with European NATO countries pursuing a dramatic qualitative and quantitative expansion of their strike munition arsenals and bomber-sized hardened aircraft shelters being extremely expensive. Engels-2, Olenya, Dyagilevo, and Shaykovka are unlikely to be remotely safe any time soon, and the Russian bomber force may come to having its peacetime home bases at locations much further east, such as Belaya and Ukrainka, and perhaps at other facilities east of the Ural Mountains, while periodically deploying aircraft to airbases west of the Urals as and when needed. This would be easier to do with bomber aircraft that were not built in the Soviet era and will not address the inherent inefficiencies of this operating concept, but Moscow appears intent on maintaining a bomber force for both conventional strike and nuclear strike missions even if this may not be the best use of Russia’s scarce resources.