The big Soviet air-superiority fighter built to out-range the F-15 — and the parent of the entire Flanker dynasty. Ukraine's pre-war top fighter, now an outclassed but still-fighting workhorse that flew night intercepts in the war's first hours and later flexed into a Western-bomb truck.
The Soviet lightweight fighter both sides fly — and the one Ukraine famously hot-rodded, bolting American HARM and JDAM and French Hammer onto a 1970s airframe with an iPad in the cockpit. Agile, short-legged, and attrition-heavy, it became an improvised SEAD jet over Ukraine.
The world's first operational fifth-generation fighter — an all-aspect stealth, supercruise, thrust-vectoring air-dominance jet that remains the US Air Force's premier air-superiority asset, from the 2014 ISIS debut to the 2023 spy-balloon kill and the 2025–26 Iran crisis.
Russia’s most advanced operational 4++ generation air-superiority fighter — a thrust-vectoring Flanker derivative with a powerful PESA radar and heavy weapons load, and the backbone of Russia’s air war over Ukraine.
The F-15EX Eagle II is a 4.5-generation heavyweight twin-engine fighter derived from the Strike Eagle / QA, built to haul extreme payloads of air-to-air and standoff munitions, and to serve as the USAF’s new homeland-defense and high-end missile truck.
China's first operational fifth-generation stealth fighter — a twin-engine, low-observable air-superiority platform fielded exclusively by the PLAAF, with a growing fleet estimated at over 200 aircraft and an emerging maritime-strike capability.