IT ISN’T EASY TO SUCKER A RECON PLANE: Ukrainian Crews Set A Complex Missile Trap For Russia’s Best Radar Plane.

Exactly how the Ukrainians shot down the four-engine A-50 with its top-mounted radar is unclear, but analyst Tom Cooper—who has written many books about Soviet and Russian warplanes—has a theory.

Ukrainian radar and missile crews lured the Russian crews into a trap.

If Cooper’s theory is correct, the Ukrainians set the trap on Saturday, when Ukrainian air force jets—presumably Sukhoi Su-24 bombers—struck Russian air force installations across the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula. “A number of radars were knocked out,” Cooper reported.

The Saturday strikes, the latest in a long campaign of Ukrainian raids on Russian defenses in Crimea, suppressed the Russians’ ground-based radar coverage, leaving the surviving missile batteries on the peninsula partially blind—especially to the north, where the terrain could mask incoming Ukrainian planes, drones and missiles.

So Russian commanders did the obvious, but stupid, thing. They ordered one of their few remaining A-50U radar planes, which normally fly far to the south over the Sea of Azov, to push farther north in order to extend radar coverage over most of Crimea.

Clever, if true.