When General Christopher Cavoli told Congress in April 2024 that Russia’s air force was emerging from the Ukraine war stronger, not weaker, the warning landed like a cold splash of water on Western assumptions. Nearly two years later, the evidence has only sharpened his point. Russia has not simply survived the air war over Ukraine. It has adapted, and the results are reshaping how NATO thinks about defending Europe.
Cavoli, who at the time led U.S. European Command, delivered a written statement to the House Armed Services Committee describing a Russian military that was actively regenerating combat power and refining how it fights. His assessment was direct: Moscow retained substantial airpower and was already producing measurable gains on the battlefield. He characterized Russia’s military as having grown more capable through the course of the conflict, a conclusion that reflected both classified and open-source intelligence. He has since been succeeded by General Darryl A. Williams, but the trajectory Cavoli identified has continued through early 2026, with Russian air operations growing more frequent and more lethal along the front lines.
The glide bomb revolution
The clearest example of Russia’s aerial adaptation is the glide bomb. These are often Soviet-era explosive munitions retrofitted with satellite-guidance kits and fold-out wings, a relatively cheap upgrade that transforms a dumb bomb into a standoff weapon capable of striking targets from dozens of miles away. Russian Su-34 fighter-bombers can now release these munitions well beyond the reach of most Ukrainian air defenses, then turn for home without ever entering the kill zone.
The tactical impact became impossible to ignore during the battle for Avdiivka, a fortified city in the Donetsk region that had held out against Russian ground assaults for months. As The Washington Post reported in March 2024, waves of glide bombs degraded Ukrainian fortifications and troop positions before infantry moved in. Avdiivka fell in February 2024. Western analysts assessed the glide bomb campaign as a decisive factor in breaking the defense.
Since then, the pattern has only expanded. Open-source tracking and reporting from outlets including the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) have documented a steady increase in Russian glide-bomb sorties through 2024 and into 2025, with strikes extending to logistics hubs, command posts, and urban areas well behind the immediate front line. Russia did not invent a wonder weapon. It found a way to make its large, aging bomber fleet dangerous again by changing tactics rather than replacing airframes.
Broader signs of adaptation
Glide bombs are the most visible piece, but Cavoli’s 2024 testimony pointed to a wider pattern. Russian commanders adjusted flight profiles and sortie planning to minimize exposure to Ukrainian surface-to-air missiles. Coordination between air and ground forces improved. Even with confirmed losses of Su-34s and other aircraft, the air force preserved a core of experienced crews and shifted them toward standoff missions rather than the risky low-altitude bombing runs that proved so costly in the war’s opening months.
The net effect: Russia can keep pressuring Ukrainian positions while absorbing fewer losses per sortie than it did in 2022. That is not air superiority in the NATO sense of the term, but it is a meaningful operational advantage over an opponent whose air-defense stocks have been stretched thin by three years of high-intensity combat.
What remains uncertain
Important gaps persist in the public picture. Cavoli confirmed regeneration was underway, but neither his testimony nor subsequent open-source reporting has pinned down how many new aircraft Russia has delivered since 2022, what production rates its factories are sustaining, or whether the current pace of reconstitution can hold over multiple years. No independently verified Russian Ministry of Defense data on post-invasion aircraft output has surfaced in Western sources as of May 2026.
The scale of the glide-bomb campaign is also hard to quantify precisely. Daily sortie and strike estimates vary across Western assessments, and Ukrainian officials have been selective about disclosing the tactical toll of specific operations. How much of Avdiivka’s fall, or subsequent Russian advances, should be attributed to glide bombs versus Ukrainian manpower shortages, ammunition rationing, or other factors remains an open question.
There is also a critical distinction between “more capable than before” and “capable enough to challenge NATO.” Russia’s standoff bombing works well against fixed positions defended by a force with limited modern air defenses. Whether the same tactics would hold up against an alliance fielding F-35s, airborne early-warning aircraft, and integrated Patriot and SAMP/T missile networks is a very different proposition. Cavoli himself framed the improvement relative to Russia’s own earlier performance, not relative to Western air forces.
Finally, the industrial ceiling matters. Glide-bomb kits are cheap, but they depend on stockpiles of suitable legacy munitions that are finite. Western sanctions continue to restrict Russian access to precision electronics. If those stockpiles thin out or component shortages bite harder, Russia may struggle to sustain the tempo that has made the weapon so effective.
The F-16 factor and Ukrainian counter-moves
Ukraine has not stood still. The first Western-supplied F-16 fighters arrived in mid-2024, and Kyiv has worked to integrate them into its air-defense architecture. In theory, F-16s equipped with AIM-120 missiles could push Russian launch platforms farther from the front, reducing the accuracy and frequency of glide-bomb strikes. Longer-range surface-to-air systems supplied by Western allies serve a similar purpose.
In practice, the results so far have been incremental rather than transformative. Ukraine’s F-16 fleet remains small, pilot training pipelines are still ramping up, and Russia has responded by adjusting launch distances and flight corridors. The contest between Russian standoff bombing and Ukrainian air defense is an ongoing adaptation race, not a settled outcome.
What this means for NATO and European security
For European governments and NATO members, the core lesson is uncomfortable. The assumption that the Ukraine war would grind Russia’s military into irrelevance has not held. At minimum, Russia’s air force has found ways to fight more effectively at lower cost and lower risk. That reality is already influencing decisions about defense spending, the pace of NATO’s eastern-flank buildup, and the types of weapons being prioritized for transfer to Ukraine.
For NATO planners specifically, the challenge is not a Russian air force that can match the alliance plane for plane. It is a force that has banked years of real combat experience, developed a tested playbook for standoff strikes, and demonstrated an ability to adapt under pressure. That combination of hard-won skill and operational resilience, rather than raw aircraft numbers, is what will define the Russian air threat in the years ahead.
Understanding both the strengths and the limits of that threat is now one of the central tasks of European security planning. Cavoli sounded the alarm in 2024. Two years on, the warning looks more prescient than ever.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
