A nuclear capable Russian Tu-95 “Bear” bomber crashed during a training flight in the Far Eastern Amur region on Tuesday, handing Vladimir Putin another stinging loss from his irreplaceable strategic fleet. Russia’s Defense Ministry said the aircraft was carrying no ammunition.

Only one of the seven crew members survived the crash.

“The plane crashed in an uninhabited area. According to preliminary reports, six crew members were killed, one was injured and evacuated to a medical facility,” the ministry said.

The crash joins an extensive list of Russian military aviation losses during the war in Ukraine. A number of those aircraft losses have been inflicted by Russia itself, including Tuesday’s deadly training disaster.

Moscow has not built a Tu-95 since 1992. Putin, 73, has relied on the aircraft to strike Ukraine throughout the full scale invasion he launched in February 2022.

The Tu-95 is one of only two Russian aircraft capable of launching long range Kh-101 cruise missiles at Ukrainian cities. The bombers can fly about 9,300 miles, carry a missile payload of 33,000 pounds and form part of Moscow’s nuclear forces.

“They’re part of Russia’s nuclear triad,” Justin Bronk, a senior research fellow for airpower and technology at the Royal United Services Institute, told The Telegraph. “They’ve been used to conduct intensive missile raids against Ukraine for four-and-a-half years.”

Oryx, the Dutch open source intelligence military analysis website, has visually confirmed 166 Russian aircraft destroyed and another 30 damaged since Putin launched the invasion. That tally includes eight Tu-95 strategic bombers destroyed and three damaged.

Ukraine has also suffered heavy aviation losses during the conflict. Oryx has visually confirmed 116 Ukrainian aircraft destroyed, four damaged and one captured.

Kyiv’s military, which publishes its own estimates of Russian losses, said Wednesday that Moscow had lost 443 aircraft since the war began. Moscow rarely releases figures covering its wartime equipment or troop losses.

Ukrainian military analyst and weapons expert Ivan Kyrychevskyi said Russia began the war with around 60 Tu-95 strategic bombers. The fleet has since reportedly fallen to about 45 aircraft, “of which a maximum of 36 can actually fly.”

The shrinking number of available Tu-95 bombers could affect Russia’s ability to continue its long range attacks. Each additional loss matters for an aircraft that Moscow has not built in more than three decades.

Robert Tollast, a researcher on the Royal United Services Institute’s land warfare team, said the bombers were “obviously really important for Russia’s deep-strike campaign.”

“So the fewer Tu-95s Russia has, the fewer of these missiles can be fired with the devastating warheads and the long range,” Tollast added.

Russia had already turned to unusual measures in an effort to protect its strategic bombers from Ukrainian attacks. Satellite imagery posted in 2023 showed car tires covering the wings of a Tu-95 at the Engels military airfield, deep inside Russian territory.

The image was posted by X user Tatarigami_UA, who described himself as a Ukrainian military reserve officer. He said Russia was using the tires as a tactic to deter drone attacks.

Witnesses told Izvestia that the bomber was flying perilously close to the ground before the crash. They initially mistook the noise for a truck, then saw the aircraft flying around treetop height before everything became bright.

The Defense Ministry sent a commission from the Russian Aerospace Forces to investigate the crash. A technical malfunction was reported as the preliminary cause, while unconfirmed Russian reports claimed that fuel exploded aboard the aircraft.