Russia has begun exporting its most advanced military aircraft and has chosen to deliver it to only one foreign military, Algeria.
The Cradle
He simply noted that the aircraft were “demonstrating their best qualities” and that “our customer is satisfied,” and left it at that.
By then, the signs had been in place for years. In 2020, Algerian generals were filmed on state television holding Su-57 models while meeting visiting Russian officials, with a collage of the fighter jet displayed at the Ministry of Defense – a signal widely interpreted in Algerian and Russian defense circles as confirmation that the acquisition decision had been made.
Five years later, Algerian state outlets and specialist defense sites reported that the first Su-57s would arrive before the following January. Russia’s Federal Service for Military-Technical Cooperation quietly confirmed that export deliveries would begin within that window.
On paper, the transaction is simple: a long-time Russian client with one of Africa’s most capable air forces adds two Su-57s to its inventory, alongside new Su-35s and, according to leaks and imagery, Su-34 strike fighters moving through the pipeline.
In strategic terms, it marks a break. For the first time, a fifth-generation combat aircraft not built by the US has been exported. And at a time when Russia is sanctioned and fighting a war in Ukraine, its flagship stealth fighter’s first foreign destination is not China, India, or a Persian Gulf monarchy, but on the Mediterranean’s southern shore.
Rabat’s US-Israeli umbrella
Across the border, arch-rival Morocco has been assembling a very different security architecture. Long before Algeria’s Su-57s appeared in reporting, Rabat was already locking in a US-cleared package of 25 F-16C/D Block 72s and upgrades of its existing F-16 fleet to the F-16V standard, buying Israeli drones and loitering munitions and deploying them over the disputed Western Sahara, and signing new air defense and satellite deals with Israel.
Around that architecture now hangs the long, quiet shadow of a possible future F-35 track that Moroccan and Israeli commentators increasingly describe as the logical next step. Where Algeria embeds Russian fighters into a layered anti-access grid built around S-300, Pantsir, and Iskander systems, Morocco is plugging itself ever deeper into a US-Israeli security ecosystem that treats the Sahara as one more front in a wider contest.
Buying from Moscow, avoiding leverage
For Algiers, the Su-57 deal is not a sudden leap but the latest chapter in a long-running procurement pattern. During the Cold War, Algiers became one of the earliest foreign operators of the MiG-25 Foxbat, using Soviet high-speed reconnaissance and interception platforms to counter western-armed neighbors – an early signal that it was willing to buy cutting-edge Soviet kit before others.
In the 2000s, it bought custom Su-30MKA fighters built to its specifications, mixing Russian airframes with non-western avionics, and cemented its position as Russia’s premier airpower client in Africa.
Now it becomes the first state to receive Russia’s Su-57 export variant, a fighter Russian sources emphasize has been combat-tested in Syria and Ukraine and photographed carrying Kh-59MK2/Kh-69 cruise missiles and Kh-58UShKE anti-radiation missiles internally.
But the aircraft is only one part of the deeper strategic calculation. Algeria is betting that a Russian-built deterrence architecture – integrating Su-57s, Su-35s, Su-34s, Iskander missiles, and layered air defenses – can consolidate airspace dominance on Algerian terms, contain Morocco’s US and Israeli-backed push in Western Sahara, and provide the technological sovereignty the west denied it after watching NATO dismantle Libya in 2011.
A state that buys American or European jets does not just import military hardware – it imports political leverage. In a crisis, spare parts can be slowed, munitions withheld, and maintenance contracts quietly frozen. The lesson has been visible from Egypt to Turkiye.
By contrast, Russian systems come with different strings: fewer public lectures, fewer conditions on domestic politics, and more willingness to transfer systems that the west would never sign off on for a non-treaty ally. Moscow’s price is paid in long-term alignment and market loyalty, not in open votes at the UN or in hosting foreign bases with NATO flags.
For decades, Algeria has built an ecosystem tuned to Soviet and Russian aviation – air bases, simulators, maintenance depots, training pipelines, and doctrine. A wholesale shift to western fighters would be an institutional revolution, and one that would impose new political dependencies. The Su-57 allows Algeria to remain inside the architecture it knows while moving to a higher rung of capability.
Escaping the “economic hit man”
Algeria’s ability to acquire high-end military platforms without external approval rests on something more fundamental than stealth: its balance sheet. After nearly collapsing under external debt and an International Monetary Fund (IMF) structural adjustment program in the 1990s, Algiers used the hydrocarbon windfall of the 2000s to take a different path. It paid down its debt.
By the mid-2000s, Algeria had repaid its IMF obligations and prepaid its Paris Club debts, and for a time had almost no external public debt at all. Instead of rolling over old loans into new ones, it accumulated reserves and kept international lenders at arm’s length.
That experience left scars. In his 2024 brief, ‘Algeria–Russia Ties: Beyond Military Cooperation?’, Yahia H. Zoubir recalls that the revival of ties with Moscow in the 2000s came after “years of violent civil strife and the economic turmoil of an IMF structural adjustment program.”
For Algerian decision makers who lived through externally mandated subsidy cuts, devaluations, and social unrest, debt is a lever outsiders can pull.
This dynamic mirrors what John Perkins describes in ‘Confessions of an Economic Hit Man’: loans marketed as development but structured to subordinate economies through conditionality, with the financial benefits cycling back to western contractors. Algeria has no appetite for returning to that model.
When Algeria orders Su-57s, Su-35s, or Iskanders, the decision rests on the revenue it controls and the financing model it sets for itself. The only volatility it accepts is the price of energy – not the oversight of creditors or the conditionality that once accompanied IMF-era loans.
What Algeria gets – and what it doesn’t
The Su-57 delivered to Algeria will differ from the version flown by Russia’s elite squadrons, as export fighters almost always do. Any differences are likely to be found in engines, electronics, and software access, not in the aircraft’s basic airframe.
On the Russian side, the ‘full’ Su-57 is built around a stealth-leaning airframe with internal weapons bays, an AESA radar complex (N036 Byelka) with multiple antenna arrays, a powerful IRST, 360-degree defensive sensors, and eventually the new “second-stage” engine known as Izdeliye 30.
Export aircraft, by contrast, are almost certain to fly with the earlier AL-41F1-series engines: still capable of supercruise and 3D thrust vectoring, but without the same fuel efficiency and thrust margin Russia is chasing for later domestic blocks.
The more significant downgrades are invisible. Avionics and sensor-fusion software determine what the aircraft can actually do with the data its sensors collect. Certain radar modes, electronic-intelligence libraries, and parallel-processing capabilities are unlikely to be included in export builds. Electronic-warfare packages and datalinks will similarly be sanitized, with fewer jamming techniques loaded and tighter controls over encryption and waveforms.
Weapons integration is also controlled. While the Su-57 is designed to carry a broad suite of standoff and anti-radiation missiles internally, export versions will not include nuclear roles, and the longest-range or most sensitive systems may be withheld.
Stealth coatings, too, differ. Russia retains its most sensitive materials for domestic units, with export variants tuned to be slightly less demanding and slightly less classified.
Still, the Su-57E represents a generational leap for Algiers – a level of capability unmatched in the region.
Surovikin in Algiers
If the Su-57E is the hardware, Sergey Surovikin is part of the system supporting it. After the Wagner mutiny in 2023, the former commander of Russian Aerospace Forces in Ukraine disappeared from public view.
Rumors in Russian and western media swung between house arrest, quiet reassignment, and worse. When he finally resurfaced clearly, it was not in Moscow but in Algiers: photographed with Algerian officers, reported in Russian outlets as leading a group of military advisers, and described in French reporting as effectively heading Russia’s advisory mission in the country.
Surovikin’s recent career has been defined by building and managing systems rather than showcasing individual platforms. In Syria, he coordinated air and ground operations in a way that allowed relatively modest numbers of aircraft and artillery to have sustained operational effects.
In Ukraine, the defensive complex that came to be known as the “Surovikin line” combined fortifications, obstacles, air defence, and aviation into a layered structure designed to slow and wear down offensive operations over time.
Whatever one thinks of the political decisions behind those wars, the operational lesson is straightforward in that he specializes in knitting different branches into a single, coherent defensive and strike architecture.
His presence signals that Russia is exporting its approach to layered defense, not just the machines that operate within it. Entrusting that task to one of its most practiced commanders says as much about Moscow’s intentions as the Su-57s themselves.
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