re: #719 erik_t
Not surprising. They were probably guns-only, the pilots would not be trained for air-to-air (Su-25 is their A-10 equivalent, more or less), and lots of WW2 experience showed that shooting down a small aircraft much slower than yours is much harder than one would expect.
So they sent ground attack craft after a drone that they likely had no chance of shooting down.
Optics then. Pure PR stunt.