According to several Chinese milbloggers, the 5th airframe of the J-36 was seen flying and they noted it could be the LRIP version. If so, this would point to an induction date before 2030​​

In 2 recent threads, many on this sub appear to have accepted Western propaganda at face value and drawn some pretty... questionable conclusions on the capabilities of F-16 vs SU-35 that defy common sense. However this was not a platform vs platform fight, it was a 4 on 1 ambush and a tactical win that likely wouldn't have happened without the Patriot. This is one of ways propaganda works: omission of key details that leads to erroneous conclusions.

I quoted FighterBomber in some comment responses, which did not draw the kind of acknowledgement I had hoped for from a Defense sub. You will see in Wes' commentary (and in the defense articles he cites) that FighterBomber's word is credible regarding VKS airframe losses (both in terms of whether it happened and how it happened), and that he's often cited in OSINT circles.

The man I'm linking here is Wes O'Donnell: ex-military commentator, not mainstream, but also not one of those "ex-military buffoon" types. His article sources its claims. https://wesodonnell.medium.com/a-deadly-ukrainian-f-16-air-ambush-just-downed-a-russian-su-35-17c86c27ff4e

Please note that this article was published on July 15 and therefore does not address the claims yesterday by General Dan Caine. I also don't think it matters whether the missile that shot down the SU-35 comes from the Patriot or from a F-16, and that the context of the fight determined the outcome; but I'll let you read and be the judge.

Here's the full text below because I know plenty of people wouldn't want to make a Medium account just to read this:

/===================================

A Deadly Ukrainian F-16 Air Ambush Just Downed a Russian Su-35

Wes O'Donnell Jul 15, 2026

One Ukrainian F-16 Flew Low. Two Waited High. A Patriot Watched the Border

Hey friends. We need to talk about this ambush.

Picture the moment from the Russian pilot’s seat…

You’re flying a Su-35, arguably Russia’s best air-superiority fighter, the plane its own air force hands only to its most experienced pilots.

Your radar is better than what the Ukrainians are flying, and it’s not close. The Su-35 carries the N035 Irbis-E, a big, brute-force phased-array radar that can throw out enough raw power to spot a fighter-sized target somewhere around 200 to 250 kilometers out.

Ukraine’s F-16s, mostly older jets donated by Denmark and the Netherlands, carrying the AN/APG-68, top out somewhere in the 100-to-150-kilometer range against a similar target.

In a straight head-on approach, you’ll likely have the Ukrainian on your scope minutes before he ever gets a return on you.

Plus, your missiles reach farther. You’ve spent months harassing Ukrainian aircraft near the front, forcing them to turn away before they can drop their bombs, and it’s worked every single time.

You feel like the ultimate hunter, perhaps the Predator from the 1980s Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.

Today looks like every other day. One lone Ukrainian F-16 flying low, lining up what looks exactly like a glide-bomb run.

So, you do what you’ve always done. You go get it. Работаем, братья.

Then the trap reveals itself, and by the time you understand the shit stew you just flew into, a missile is already seconds from impact and there’s not a single thing left to do about it.

What Ukraine confirmed, and what it didn’t

On July 8, Ukraine’s Air Force announced it had shot down a Russian Su-35 in the eastern sector. Hours later, Ukraine’s Third Army Corps posted drone footage of the aircraft falling in a flat spin, wrapped in fire, then burning on the ground in its area of responsibility.

Russian sources didn’t dispute the loss. Russian military bloggers, including the well-followed Fighterbomber channel, said the pilot ejected and survived, though Ukraine hasn’t independently confirmed that part.

What Ukraine has not said, publicly, is how the aircraft actually died.

Every detail about the ambush itself, the three-aircraft formation, the Patriot battery, which weapon actually fired, comes from Russian military Telegram channels trying to explain their own loss, not from a Ukrainian after-action report.

So, Ukraine confirmed the kill. Russia grudgingly confirmed the embarrassment. Everything that happened in between remains classified, disputed, or living inside Telegram’s natural habitat of half-facts, bravado, and men with call signs like Fighterbomber.

Here’s the version that’s circulating, sourced to Russian channels including Fighterbomber and a blogger known as Voivode, and picked up by outlets translating and compiling the claims.

One Ukrainian F-16, the bait, flew low toward the front, flying a profile that looked exactly like a Ukrainian jet setting up to drop guided bombs on Russian positions; the kind of mission the Su-35 has been sent to intercept for months.

Two more F-16s reportedly sat higher, out of the Russian pilot’s immediate view, armed with AIM-120 AMRAAMs.

Somewhere behind all three, a Ukrainian Patriot battery had allegedly moved to within roughly 60 kilometers of the front line, close enough to get real eyes on Russian-controlled airspace with its radar.

The Su-35 pilot did the thing he’d apparently done successfully many times before. He moved to intercept the low-flying jet. And once he committed to that intercept, the geometry of the fight quietly stopped being what he thought it was.

Fighterbomber himself, in a message laced with the kind of profanity you’d expect from a man explaining why his side just lost, put it about as honestly as a Russian source ever will. “Three aircraft plus a Patriot against one of ours,” he wrote.

Patriot or AMRAAM? Here’s why nobody can prove it yet

Every version of this story eventually snags on the same question: Did an F-16 kill the Su-35 with an air-to-air missile, or did the Patriot battery on the ground do it?

Some of the reporting says Patriot provided “target illumination” for the F-16s, and I want to slow down on that phrase because it’s not technically accurate.

The older generation of radar-guided missiles, the semi-active radar homing weapons like the original AIM-7 Sparrow, needed the shooter’s own radar locked onto the target and continuously radiating a steady beam for the entire time of flight.

The missile’s seeker wasn’t smart enough to find the target on its own… It just listened for the shooter’s radar energy bouncing off the target and steered itself toward the strongest reflection, which meant the launching aircraft was chained to that target the whole way in, unable to maneuver hard or break its own lock without the missile going stupid.

That continuous beam is what “illumination” traditionally means in the strict engineering sense; a persistent, dedicated radar painting one target for one missile’s entire flight.

AMRAAM broke that chain on purpose.

It’s an active radar homing weapon, meaning it carries its own miniature radar transmitter in the nose. For most of the flight, the missile is just navigating by inertial guidance, dead reckoning based on where the shooter’s fire-control computer calculated the target would be, occasionally refined by a data-link update from the launching jet if the target maneuvers.

Only in the final seconds, at a range Western fighter pilots call “pitbull,” does the missile’s own onboard radar switch on, find the target itself, and guide home independently.

Nobody has to illuminate anything for it at that point. It’s hunting on its own.

Which is why Patriot handing over a usable weapons solution isn’t as simple as it sounds. There’s a real difference between a search track, good enough to tell you something’s out there and roughly where, and a fire-control quality track, precise enough in range, bearing, and closure rate to actually compute a valid missile launch solution.

Patriot’s engagement radar is plenty capable of the second kind for its own interceptors, but handing that exact fire-control-grade data to an F-16’s weapons computer over a tactical data link, in a form the jet’s systems can actually use to generate its own AMRAAM launch parameters, is a nontrivial integration problem; not a given just because both systems are on the same Link-16 network.

It’s far more likely Patriot supplied Ukraine’s broader air-defense network with early warning and a rough vector, cueing the F-16 crews on where to point their own radars and climb into position, after which the fighters closed the loop themselves with their own onboard sensors before taking the shot.

That’s a valuable contribution… But it’s a different job than being the missile’s actual guidance source.

But don’t write Patriot off as just a spotter, because it has real teeth of its own. The PAC-2 GEM-T interceptor Ukraine fields is specifically built to engage aircraft, not only cruise and ballistic missiles, and Ukraine has run this exact play before, moving a battery dangerously close to the front, sitting it quiet under emissions control so Russian sensors can’t find it, switching the radar on only once a Russian aircraft commits to an engagement, firing fast, and then displacing before anyone can retaliate.

If that’s what happened here, the bait F-16 wasn’t luring the Su-35 toward a fighter at all. It was luring the Russian jet into a predetermined box where a ground-based SAM battery had already done its homework on the altitude, the geometry, and the timing.

My honest read, and it’s a lean rather than a conclusion, is that an AMRAAM off one of the covering F-16s is slightly more likely, based on how the two top-cover jets are described and the way the Patriot role gets framed as a sensor rather than an explicit shooter.

But I want to be straight with you. The public evidence doesn’t settle this. And it won’t be settled by burning wreckage, by a Telegram post, or by an aviation blog’s confident headline. It gets settled by missile fragments, radar logs, a cockpit recording, or an actual Ukrainian operational statement, none of which currently exist in public.

Regardless, here’s why I think the credit question, satisfying as it would be to answer, is actually the less interesting part of this story.

Ukraine appears to have studied a standard Russian habit: Spot a Ukrainian strike aircraft, scramble or vector an Su-35, use its superior altitude and missile range to force the Ukrainian jet away before it can drop its weapons.

That pattern has worked for Russia for months, which is exactly what made it exploitable. Ukraine merely needed to understand the Su-35 pilot’s decision cycle well enough to write the script he’d follow, then place the shooters, real or decoy, exactly where that script would lead him.

The old picture of air combat is two fighters finding each other with their own radars and killing each other with their own missiles, a clean duel between two similar machines.

What Ukraine appears to have run instead spreads that single engagement across a network.

One aircraft acts as bait. Two more sit as the hidden teeth. A ground radar feeds everyone a better picture than any single platform could build alone.

Russia’s best fighter may have found itself fighting three F-16s, a Patriot radar, and Ukraine’s entire ground-control network, all at once, several seconds before he understood any of that was happening.

Ukraine can’t afford to trade F-16s against Su-35s one for one. It has too few of the former and Russia has too many of the latter. What it can apparently do is build a temporary, local pocket where several Ukrainian systems gang up on a single Russian aircraft, then dissolve that pocket the instant the shot is taken.

Who cares if that’s not a fair fight? It’s a smarter one.

The gamble hiding underneath the win

Ukraine has painfully few Patriot batteries and even fewer interceptor missiles to feed them, and every single one exists primarily to protect cities from the ballistic missiles Russia keeps throwing at Kyiv.

Pulling a battery forward, within 60 kilometers of the front, to go hunting for a single fighter jet is closer to walking the family silver into a dark alley than it is to standard air-defense doctrine.

That battery has to relocate, establish communications, orient its radar, coordinate tightly with friendly aircraft sharing the same airspace, avoid shooting down its own F-16s in the process, take its shot, and then get out before Russian drones, Iskander missiles, or a Lancet operator hoping to become a local Donbas hero can find it parked in the open.

Just three days after this ambush, on July 11, Zelensky said publicly that Ukraine’s stockpile of Patriot interceptors had run dry, forcing him to push for faster diplomatic and weapons channels from allies.

So, if Kyiv genuinely spent one of its increasingly scarce Patriot missiles to bag a single fighter jet, in the same week its own capital was left thinner on the exact same weapon, that wasn’t a cheap flex. Whether that bet was worth it depends entirely on what Ukraine’s air-defense planners knew about their own dwindling stockpile that week, information the rest of us simply don’t have.

Still, Ukraine hasn’t named the weapon that made the kill. The three-F-16-and-a-Patriot formation comes entirely from Russian sources trying to explain a loss, not from an official Ukrainian account. The precise Patriot position hasn’t been independently verified.

The exact crash location remains vague by design in Ukraine’s own statement, and I’d resist the urge to pin it to a specific town the way some secondary reports have.

“Target illumination” may simply be an imprecise translation of a more mundane sensor-sharing arrangement. No missile fragments have surfaced publicly to settle AMRAAM versus Patriot one way or the other. And the pilot’s survival, while widely reported, still traces back to Russian sources rather than a neutral confirmation.

The history books will eventually credit an F-16 pilot with a missile switch flipped at exactly the right second, or a Patriot crew standing at a console sixty kilometers from a front line they had no business being that close to.

Russia has a more immediate and more uncomfortable problem than sorting out which one gets the credit.

A single Ukrainian F-16, flying low near the front line, can no longer be treated as one aircraft on one mission. It might be a bomber. It might be bait. It might be the visible, deliberately exposed tip of a trap that also includes two more fighters an enemy pilot can’t see and a ground radar he doesn’t know is already tracking him.

Every Russian pilot flying near that front line now has to fly with a new and deeply uncomfortable question riding in the seat next to him. What else is out there that I can’t see yet?

For three years, Russia’s tactical aviation has hunted from a position of confidence.

Ukraine just reminded them that every hunter can become the hunted. As Dutch’s team discovered in Predator: “If it bleeds, we can kill it.”

Слава Україні!

A new type of Chinese submarine, featuring an extremely miniaturized conning tower protruding from the top of the hull, has been spotted at the Jiangnan Shipyard in Shanghai, China. The Asahi Shimbun analyzed satellite images taken by a US satellite company. According to several experts, it is highly likely to be an attack nuclear submarine. This highlights China's efforts to improve its submarine attack capabilities.

Satellite images taken on May 29 by the US satellite company BlackSky show a submarine on a floating dock at the Gangnam Shipyard. According to satellite image analysts, the submarine is approximately 120 meters long and 10 meters wide.

According to an analysis by former Vice Admiral Masao Kobayashi, who served as commander of the Japan Self-Defense Forces' submarine fleet, the submarine photographed is larger than a conventional submarine and is close in size to the modern Type 093 attack submarine currently in operation. He believes it is highly likely to be an improved or new version of the Type 093.

A key difference from the conventional Type 093 is that the sail, where the ship's operation is directed using periscopes and other equipment, has been miniaturized to the point where it is difficult to see in satellite imagery. A smaller sail reduces water resistance and noise in the ocean, allowing for higher speeds and making the ship harder to detect. Kobayashi suggests that "its role may be to silently approach U.S. aircraft carriers underwater and launch attacks."

According to Iranian sources, following an incident at the Natanz nuclear facility in 2020, Iran constructed a new nuclear facility to produce centrifuge components; this is the ‘Pickaxe Mountain’ underground nuclear facility.

Israel believes that Iran has already moved centrifuges and enriched uranium to this facility; according to a report by ISRAEL HAYOM, Israel is currently on high alert.

However, judging by the results of the previous ‘Midnight Hammer’ bombing campaign, it would be difficult for a B-2 fleet to inflict devastating damage on the ‘Pickaxe Mountain’ underground nuclear facility—which has been carved out of granite—from the outside, whilst the Israeli Air Force has virtually no capability to launch an effective strike against ‘Pickaxe Mountain’ on its own. The only viable solution appears to be a high-risk commando raid carried out by US and Israeli special forces, with the assistance of Iranian insiders, This would require the US and Israeli leadership to be willing to bear the high risks and heavy casualties that such an operation might entail; a similar operation was put to the test in a real-world scenario a few months ago during the rescue of the pilot.

From the leadership’s perspective, unless their political careers are already in serious jeopardy and they need to take a huge gamble to turn the situation around, the motivation to proceed with such a course of action is extremely low.

https://tw.voicetube.com/videos/215526

What to know about Iran's Pickaxe Mountain, home to an underground nuclear site

I don't think this was ever a topic during the 40 beginning days of the war, or the ceasefire. Regardless of the fact that many people are saying the bunker buster bombs won't be effective against a target like this and so tactical nukes might be necassery, this mountain doesn't have anything to do with Iran's ability to close the strait of Hormuz or its ballistic missile capabilities. So unless the site is somehow so valuable to the Iranians that they would surrender or something for it to not get destroyed, it's not going to affect the important aspects of the war

One of the benefits of nuclear powered ships is that they don't need a tanker following them and can go charging around at top speed without worrying about burning too much fuel. Trouble is, none for the escort ships can do so as well because they're all conventionally powered, and uncrewed surface vessels would have a similar issue. Putting a full-blown pressurized water reactor on a drone would negate any cost savings and is probably a bad idea from a safety perspective. Radioisotope thermoelectric generators, however, convert decay heat into electricity, so there's no moving parts to break and no risk of a meltdown. They're already used in uncrewed places like lighthouses along Russia's arctic coast and radar stations in Alaska. Plus the Navy could plug them into a base's electrical grid and reduce their electricity bills slightly when they're in port. RTGa can't be turned off so you might as well take advantage of the power.

The specific scenario that got me thinking about it was that the Defiant class (please hear me out before you smash that downvote button...) are going to be nuclear powered (please humor me and assume they'll be built). They could assemble a task force of the carrier, battleship, and perhaps half a dozen RTG powered USVs with missile launchers and perhaps a towed sonar array that wouldn't require an oiler following them around. A system like the Cooperative Engagement Capability could be used to relay data from the carrier's airborne early warning aircraft and possibly the USVs' sonar to the battleship's Aegis Combat System, which could then use that to order the appropriate USV to fire the appropriate missile or do so itself.

I suppose the two main questions are "can they be built without being too expensive" and "can they generate enough power for a 30+ knot ship". I did Google "radioisotope thermoelectric generator powered ship" and got no results so I'm assuming the answer is no, but I'm curious what everyone else thinks.

(now you may smash that downvote button)