“Wonder how many will make it back...”
Good question.
I wonder how many of them were those old prop job Bears. Now, those are a REAL demonstration of power. Fifty year old planes are scary for sure...
The truth is Russia can’t project power from one border of the country to the other much less externally.
The Russian Air Force Tu-95MS are new-build airframes. The last came off the production line in the early 1990s. It is purely a long-range ALCM platform. That is it’s war mission. It doesn’t need to come close to any air defense system and can launch its ALCMs from thousands of miles away. The same as the USAFs B-52Hs would not be expected to go into Russian airspace as it would launch its ALCMs from a stand-off position.
The B-52 was launched one year earlier. Our 52s will be 70 or 80 years old when we muster them out. Some of the Bears were built as recently as the 90s. The world’s most advanced turboprop planes. Some may wonder, why turboprops instead of straight up jets? Range.