Russia’s Su-75 Checkmate aircraft is still just a paper plane

According to recent reports, Russia’s vaporware stealth fighter, the Su-75 Checkmate, is finally heading for test flights… or at least, that’s what Moscow and the jet’s manufacturer, Rostec, want you to believe.

Russia first announced the Checkmate four years ago. Touting it as an extremely low-cost alternative to the F-35, the Su-75 Checkmate is as a single-engine, stealth fighter meant to complement Russia’s much larger, twin-engine Su-57.

Yet, right from the start, Russian claims about this new Su-75 were suspect. Firstly, Russian officials claimed the fighter would come with a sticker price of just $30 million per airframe. This would make it less than one-third the cost of an F-35 and a lot cheaper than even most 4th generation fighters on the market today. But it’s not just the price tag that makes the Checkmate seem like little more than a Russian pipe dream.

Back in November 2021, just a few months after the Checkmate was first unveiled, Sandboxx News started digging into statements made by Rostec and the Russian government; and it turned out that what they weren’t claiming turned out to be much more interesting instead.

After scrubbing through dozens of articles published by Russian’s state-owned TASS news agency about the Su-75 Checkmate, and every press release on the Rostec website about it, we couldn’t find a single example of any Russian officials ever calling it a “stealth fighter,” or describing its stealth capabilities at all. Instead, Moscow relied on sensational news outlets, and the aircraft’s sleek exterior design, to advance the narrative that this fighter was stealthy.

In fact, when asked directly by journalists if the Su-75’s stealth would allow it penetrate contested airspace, Rostec’s spokesperson straight up sidestepped the question entirely, responding by saying, “Importantly, the aircraft is capable of accomplishing any tasks outside the area of the operation of air defense weapons, thus saving the pilot’s life.”

A non-flying prototype of the SU-75 Checkmate, revealed at Moscow Air show 2021. (Photo by KF-21A/Wikimedia Commons)

The comments by Rostec’s spokesperson like an admission that the new Checkmate fighter lacks the stealth capabilities necessary to fly inside contested airspace.

Our coverage was picked up by the international media, even by pro-Russian sites like bulgarianmilitary.com, but in the time since, Russian officials didn’t change their tune.

Russia could have just lied about the Su-75’s stealth capabilities, the same way it lied about Kinzhal being hypersonic, but it didn’t do that because it has learned from past experiences that overstating stealth capabilities leads to customers bailing out of your fighter program.

This is what happened in 2018, when India exited the Su-57 program.

Between 2007 and 2018, the Su-57, which was known as the PAK-FA program at the time, was being developed in collaboration with India. New Delhi had plans to procure a large number of the new stealth fighter, which would have supported the production costs of Russia fielding its own Su-57 fleet. But by 2018, India was so unimpressed with the Su-57 that it pulled out of the program saying that the jet failed to meet its requirements, although it did not publicly specifying which ones.

With Russia’s sanction-strapped economy and difficulty producing the Su-57 in appreciable numbers, Moscow is relying on the idea that foreign customers will step in and place orders for the Su-75 Checkmate instead, thus providing it with the infusion of cash it desperately needs to actually develop and build the Checkmate.

And regarding the claims that the Checkmate will start flying next year, Rostec’s CEO, Sergey Chemezov himself said that the company is still working on the development of the aircraft and that it needs “some time to get the real prototype for the test flights.”

In other words, the Checkmate is still just a paper plane, and if it ever becomes more than that, it’s unlikely to be much of a stealth fighter at all.

Feature Image: A Su-75 Checkmate non-flying prototype at the MASK Airshow 2021. (Photo by the Russian Presidential Press and Information Office)

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