The lead news this week is pretty obvious: The Unmanned Systems Forces (USF) + the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) guys gave greater St. Petersburg a pasting and took 40% of the crude oil export capacity of the Russian Federation offline.
By which I mean, last weekend, the Baltic was the single biggest route by which Russia exported oil. This weekend: none.
Since many of you will be aware of a war in progress between the US and Iran and the dispute between those countries about what tanker traffic should or should not pass the Strait of Hormuz, the subtraction of that stream of crude from world markets is pretty important – far beyond Ukraine and Russia.
But beyond that, this week we saw Ukraine’s long-range strike forces take a big step not just towards maturity, but a demonstrated expansion of the bleeding-edge envelope of drone warfare. One might even say a “leveling up event,” and since that is a fair pretext for a D&D reference, I offer one here:
For serious Russian war planners, the implications have to be frightening.
Just as Ukraine is demonstrating what rational, adaptive strategy looks like, the senior decision makers in the Kremlin are showing precious little of it. Which, bringing this back to the US-Iran situation in an unpleasant parallel, is not entirely unlike the kind of leadership deficit we’re seeing from the White House.
The implication of that, of course, is that inertia and wishful thinking at the top of the Russian pyramid are going to drive Ukrainian drone warfare technique even further.
Frontline trends
As always, we start with the infantry and their support. Overall, this week, both sides ran small-scale attacks to gain ground. On the Russian side, it seems to be a mix of actual attempts to HOLD ground and demonstrative actions in which soldiers are sacrificed to demonstrate to higher levels of Russian command that attacks are taking place, and Russia is “advancing.”
Across the front, as the weather has cleared and drone density has increased, it is becoming obvious that Russian infantry infiltrating forward is not necessarily a break in Ukrainian positions, but rather Russian infantry taking cover in the gray/kill zone where they are hunted down.
A key reason this is happening is that the Ukrainians have been actively hunting the vehicles that deliver supplies and soldiers to the points where they start walking. From the last several weeks of reports, you will recall that this is a direct result of increased quantities of Ukrainian reconnaissance drones and strike drones like the Bulava.
On the Ukrainian side, offensive operations continue in the southern Zaporizhzhia sector, alongside the former Dnipro reservoir, now a very thickly wooded lowland, and around Hulyaipole.
Here, there is pretty solid evidence of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) clearing a few villages.
For example, AMK Mapping saw operations March 25-26 this way: it’s a fairly good snapshot of one day:
In the Khotyn, Yunakivka, and Myropillia directions, both Russian and Ukrainian forces have advanced over the last few weeks. In the west, Russian forces captured new tree line positions north of Nova Sich and entered the forest on the approaches to the village. They also continued fighting for the approaches to Mala Korchakivka and are attempting to enter the tree lines on the edge of the settlement. To the east, Ukrainian forces counterattacked towards Yunakivka and recaptured a number of tree line positions up to the southern bank of the Loknya River. Meanwhile, the Russians improved their positions along the highway towards Khrapivshchyna. Further east, Ukrainian forces counterattacked and once again recaptured the groves and forested areas in the gulley west of the international border west of Gornal. On the other hand, Russian forces improved their positions farther into the tree lines towards Myropillia and continued attempts to enter Oleksandriya from the northwest.
About +6.84 square kilometers (2.64 square miles) in favor of Ukraine.
About +4.68 square kilometers (1.81 square miles) in favor of Russia.
Chasiv Yar/Donetsk region
This is one of those places where the Russian infiltrations that, last month, seemed like dangerous thrusts, now seem to be small groups of Russians trying to hide out and getting hunted down and attacked.
Around Kostiantynivka, there are reports that Ukrainian artillery has been in action, and I’ve read accounts that some of the firing is fairly intense, five or so shells a minute. It is in character for the Ukrainians to sneak up guns and hide them and pile up ammo prior to a clearing operation, but I have no info that it’s happening, just reports that the Ukrainian guns are shooting a lot and supposedly Ukrainian troops have cleared some wood lines and village remains to the northeast of Chasiv Yar.
Hottest fighting supposedly in progress in Berestok. From the Ukrainian side, no reports of calamities or impending disaster or that most-feared term in the AFU, “a complicated situation” or even worse, “a heavy situation,” which we war veterans know is usually an unmissable code for “Ukrainians about to retreat.”
None of that is noted here this week, and Chasiv Yar is one of those places where we’ve heard about terrible situations from time to time repeatedly for the last two years.
Zaporizhzhia/Hulyaipole/Dnipro Reservoir
A Ukrainian push is in progress here, but it’s difficult to gauge, yet, the scale of the effort and the degree of Russian resistance. Operationally, and looking at the map, the most obvious objective would be to push Russian forces south enough to keep them from flying attack drones into Zaporizhzhia. Reports have come in that AFU forces captured Stepnohirsk, and there are several reports of infantry fighting in Prymorske. Whether this is mopping up, infantry meeting battles, house-to-house fighting, I’m not sure.
Along the Dnipro former reservoir, confirmed reports that the Ukrainians captured Oleksandrivka and are pushing into the hamlet of Berezove. This is a continuation of counterattack operations launched in early February, and so the best guess is the fighting units here are assault infantry and thus whatever is happening there is an AFU priority. We know this because we have seen a clear pattern that wherever the assault infantry is, that’s almost certainly where General Oleksandr Syrsky’s looking.
Ukrainian military intelligence (HUR), a somewhat more reliable source than the generic AFU, reports its operators “completely cleared” the Prymorske rural clinic and “pushed the Russians from the main heights of the village.” Which may well be, but HUR, under normal circumstances, fields light infantry and commandos, so that may be an indicator that the Russian troops are also without heavy weapons. Still, at minimum, the picture is the Ukrainians with the initiative, here as well, which I know doesn’t fit into the narrative that the Russians are unstoppable and the Ukrainians will collapse, but I can only report what’s out there.
Lyman
Here, our old comrades, 3rd Assault Brigade, the Kyiv unit that knows what it’s doing but also has a press section dedicated to telling the world the 3rd is defeating Russia and Putin all by itself as the rest of the AFU watches and cheers, absolutely have cut up another Russian armored attack, and I am seeing unconfirmed reports that they recaptured the village of Yampil, which some of you may remember was a huge epicenter of fighting way back in April and May 2022. This is all Serebransky Forest territory. Not clear on the size of the Russian attack, possibly around a company, maybe five armored vehicles and 10-15 automobiles, motorcycles, and ATVs.
Also this week, on Wednesday, the Russians hit and destroyed a holding dam on the Siverskyi Donets near the town of Raihorodok. The main purpose of the reservoir is to provide Sloviansk and, to a lesser extent, Kramatorsk with fresh water. Taken together with the commitment of Russian armor around Lyman, this is a pretty reliable indicator that some part of the Russian military still is operating under a plan in which there is a big offensive that will capture those two cities. This is consistent with the way the Kremlin and the Russian milblogosphere is talking, which is Russia cannot even begin to discuss a ceasefire unless it controls all of Donetsk region, the main barriers to that are the cities of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk and the Ukrainian forces holding them, therefore, in order to stop fighting, Russian must fight very hard to the east of those two cities and defeat all Ukrainian forces.
Which is well enough, but, first last week we saw elite Russian marine units get yanked from this sector to the Zaporizhzhia sector to put out fires there, second if we open sourcers can figure out this is a Russian main attack axis, then the AFU has to be well ahead of us, and third as noted above, to get to their objectives the Russians have to get through 3rd Assault Brigade and all of 3rd Corps. Which, as the 3rd Corps commander (promoted from 3rd Brigade command) Brigadier General Andriy Biletsky points out regularly, has not lost a meter of ground to Russian forces in the past 18 months.
Kupiansk
On Saturday, the last Russian soldier is thought to have been hunted down and killed, the city is declared fully clear of Russians. The Russian milbloggers/propaganda platforms are bemoaning the event and complaining the Russian army isn’t acting as mighty and unstoppable as it is supposed to because it let the sneaky Ukrainians cut off supply to Kupiansk, which, of course, was dishonest and unfair play by the Ukrainians, but according to the Russian milbloggers, the Russian General Staff should have prepared for it.
Note that last week, no less than Russian President Vladimir Putin declared Kupiansk a huge trap in which 15 Ukrainian brigades are surrounded.
Kupiansk really is a definable Ukrainian ground victory over Russia; it took about three months (or even six, depending on how you count), but the result is crystal-clear. It’s too bad that a lot of Western observers and politicians will never notice and keep blathering on about weak, hapless Ukraine getting beaten up by mighty, unstoppable Russia. But those people mouthing off, they aren’t on the ground, so the truth will catch up with them. You know, like it just did with Putin.
Bombarding Russia – The Baltic
This has been a banner week for Ukrainian long-range strike forces. Since we’ve seen several threads of background activity that was observable but at the time it wasn’t clear whether it would deliver results, and this week we saw proof that it did, this section will be more about the background operations and preparation work the Ukrainians put in to deliver the result that they achieved this week, again, which was to knock 40% of Russia’s oil export capacity off-line in 96 hours of drone strikes.
But to recapitulate, since last Sunday, Ukraine has launched between 500 and 600 drones at targets inside Russian territory, including a massive attack on Sunday-Monday made up of 250-300 aircraft. There were targets everywhere, but the very obvious main effort was the two main ports on the Baltic that Russia uses to load oil tankers: Ust-Luga and Primorsk. Both of these had been hit before and even put offline before, and then hit again.
This week, the Ukrainians hit both those sites three times, and I am not aware of Ukrainian repeat targeting that intense anywhere, anytime in this war. The predictable outcome was epic fires and a total shutdown of exports. Besides that, the Ukrainians hammered a naval yard near Primorsk and partially capsized an icebreaker patrol boat under construction and damaged a naval spy ship, ruined docks, took out a big refinery/pumping station, and tore up pipelines. Over at Ust-Luga, the drones hit three tankers (which left immediately), and there are reports of a pair of Russian coast guard cutters that got droned as well. Here’s an article with plenty – but not all – the incendiary details.
For the record, the tankers all were ultimately run by Greek shipping companies. Flags were Greek (Aispopos). Sea Hymn (Marshall Islands), and Fiesta (Sierra Leone). It seems at least two of the three were legitimate shadow fleet elements.
An indicator of the effectiveness of all this, and the mayhem, was to be found in the Russian milblogger corps which, once it was clear the icebreaker had basically been sunk, in lockstep kicked out goofy claims that the reason the Ukrainians succeeded with a strike – it doesn’t mean Russia is weaker, not in the least – is that they cheated by flying their drones over Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia to attack ports around St. Petersburg from an unfair direction.
There is not only zero evidence of this, but I (and hundreds of others) have lost sleep this week watching reports of the Ukrainian drones transiting Russian airspace, between official Russian air raid warnings, airport shutdowns, and the Russian internet, it’s pretty easy to see where the drones are flying. The evidence is 100%, rock-solid: these strikes launched in Ukraine skirted the Belarus-Russia border on the Russian side (more on that shortly) and attacked both ports from the south.
There was a single report of a drone entering Estonian airspace from Russia and hitting a power station chimney, but nothing, repeat nothing, appears to have flown from NATO airspace into Russian airspace. Except in the mind of the Russian propaganda people, of course.
Bombarding Russia – The everywhere else
Since the US-Iran War has already somehow magically made it that there is no war in Ukraine or Russia anymore, it should be pretty obvious that all the burning oil export infrastructure around the Baltic isn’t very big news these days, then everywhere else the USF has been busy is even less newsworthy, to that readership.
Which is a shame, because another big aspect of the pretty spectacular strikes vs. Ust-Luga and Primorsk is all the other places Ukraine hit as well. People outside Russia could probably care less, but then, Ukraine isn’t at war with those people.
Here’s this week’s list of most of the drone attacks vs. Russia this week. The point is to see that the Baltic operation was only a piece of all operations.
- Ufa, oil refinery (possibly from 20th), March 21
- Krasnodar, Anapa, gas compressor station, fire, sabotage? Accident? March 21
- Donetsk, drones, target UNK, March 22
- Smolensk, drones, possible air defense strikes, March 22
- Leningrad region, Primorsk oil terminal, massive fires, March 22-23
- Luhansk, March 22-23
- Sevastopol, air defenses, drones shot down, Kamyshova Bukhta, March 24
- Leningrad Oblast, Vyborg + Ust-Luga port oil, LNG and coal, modern Arctic patrol boat/icebreaker appears sunk, Novatek refinery hit, substantial fires, secondary explosions, March 24-25
- Belgorod, power grid, March 24-25
- Moscow, UNK, air defense firing, March 24-25
- Leningrad Oblast, Kirishi, KINIF oil refinery, March 25-26
- Leningrad Oblast, again Vyborg + Ust-Luga, multiple explosions, fires, March 25-26
- Crimea, air defense active, March 25-26
- Melitopol, troop base? March 25-26
- Leningrad Oblast, Ust-Luga and Primorsk, substantial fires, SBU drones, March 26-27
- Crimea, Air-Petra mountain, radio/radar site, March 26-27
- Crimea, vic. Yalta, Pantsir system, March 26-27
- Volgograd region, Cherpovets, Apatit chemical plant (fertilizer/explosives), and Severstal factory, March 26-27
- Smolensk, aviation repair facility, probable, March 26-27
As you can see, Russian air defenses are a regular target, and at times, what air defense gets hit this week is a reasonably good indicator of what’s going to get hit next week.
Another way to put it might be, this week the Ukrainians try to kick out a window in the Russian air defense network, and the next week they try to fly a bunch of drones through the window. This is not hope, or faith, or optimism; it is a pattern of behavior we can see and document clearly.
Background to the Baltic attacks
On March 22-23, in Russia’s Bryansk Oblast, so right on the border, Ukrainian forces struck a 2S6 Tunguska self-propelled anti-aircraft gun-missile system and a Nebo-U radar station near a village called Suponevo.
Both these systems live and exist in the Russian air force inventory, to keep Ukrainian drones out of the sky where there are Russians. Ukraine’s General Staff confirmed the strike.
Also on March 22-23, USF forces used several of those new Bulava loitering munitions to destroy a Buk-M3 launcher and a Buk-M2 loader-launcher vehicle, also in Bryansk Oblast, about 50 kilometers (31 miles) inside Russian territory. It’s not precisely clear which got taken out first, the Buk-M3 by the Bulavas, or the Nebo-U and the Tunguska by other unidentified drones.
Prior to that, on March 16-17, also in Bryansk Oblast, Ukrainian forces destroyed a Tor-M2U short-to-medium-range surface-to-air missile system near Klintsy, which was about 40 kilometers (25 miles) from the border and well within HIMARS range, but for whatever reason, the Ukrainian General Staff put out video confirming it was hit and destroyed by drones. A Tor is, more or less, a longer-ranged but still short-range air defense system. Its destruction near the border probably helped the Ukrainians hit the Nebo-U radar deeper in sector a week later, and for that matter, probably the Tunguska as well, because a Nebo-U radar costs about $100 million and can see 600 kilometers (373 miles), so for sure the Tunguska was there to protect it.
The easiest way to explain all this is that the Ukrainians, when planning the big Baltic oil terminal strikes, decided the best way to get drones to target was to use Bulava loitering munitions, which are relatively new and the Russians are not used to, to break a hole in the Russian air defense belt in the Bryansk region. The Tor near Klintsy was the first target and opened a door to hit other air defense systems deeper in the Bryansk region. Those were taken out on the first day of the strikes, and subsequent attacks are reasonable evidence that the Russians have been unable to fill the gap yet. This is speculation, but the Ukrainian strikes in Bryansk are unlikely to have been random accidents.
Background to Ukraine’s assault on the Russian air defense network
Ukrainians attacking Russian air defense isn’t news in and of itself, but at some point, scale occurs, and then there are downstream effects that weren’t there before.
An open source group called the tochnyi.info project recently put out some excellent research on that very subject, and effectively documented the fact that as serious the Ukrainians are about crippling Russian oil exports abroad, they are even more committed to finding Russian air defenses and destroying them, in a strategy that assumes that decreasing numbers of Russian air defense systems facing increasing numbers of Ukrainian drones will, at some point, create long-range strike critical mass. Again, not speculation, not philosophy. We can see it happening.
I recommend you read the full report, and I’m attaching one of the report’s excellent graphics to help present the information, but here are the highlights:
- Notwithstanding all the fire and smoke in the Baltic region recently, beyond any question, the priority of Ukrainian effort is to southwest Russia and Crimea.
- Russia’s air defense system in that area is already degraded, and the deterioration is not stopping.
- From June 2025 (my personal start date of the Ukrainian bombardment campaign is late July, but whatever) through present, Tochnyi has counted 237 separate Ukrainian strikes against Russian air defense systems.
- The entire inventory of Russian air defense systems has been so badly degraded that it is already well past the point where it would struggle against the NATO or Chinese air force.
- Broken down by systems, the hit counts excluding the top-end S-300 and S-400 are Buk — 56 hits, Tor — 56 hits, Pantsir — 27 hits, Tunguska 2S6 / Osa / Strela — 22 hits.
- If you calculate the value of all that kit, it’s above $4 billion of tactical-level air defense systems potentially lost by Russia in Ukraine, and to replace a lot of it, Russia needs electronics that are sanctioned.
- The high-end stuff is, well, more. The report counts 74 confirmed strikes on S-300/S-400 components, of which there were 29 strikes on S-400 radars, 17 strikes on S-300 radars, 19 strikes on launchers, nine strikes on the newer S-350 Vityaz system, 58 strikes on the Nebo radar, 12 on the Niobium-SV radar, 29 on the Casta / Harmony radar, and 14 on the Podlozh radar.
- I can’t confirm every single strike because I didn’t do the research myself, but I can tell you that after four years of watching reports, all of the preceding seems reasonable and probable to me, and I’m sure I’ve seen most of it.
- The estimated value of all of THAT equipment is, drum roll, $16-$18 billion, and the electronics for that stuff, being more complex and expensive, is more difficult for Russia to acquire than for the tactical systems.
Which leads me to two unalterable bottom lines, and one snarky observation:
1.It is very difficult to imagine a scenario in which the Ukrainian effort against Russian air defenses were to become weaker and less effective. The opposite is the only reasonable outcome to expect.
2. The Russian air defense network is going to degrade further; it is inevitable, and sooner or later, we are going to see bigger cracks. Not hope. It seems like there’s no other way it can play out.
Snark: NATO should be paying Ukraine (well, actually, I suppose they are) for their good work smoothing the path for NATO air forces to operate in Russian airspace. Since NATO air power is the main tactical advantage NATO forces have over Russia in a potential ground war, the service Ukraine is providing – OK, the Ukrainians are doing it to defend themselves, not NATO, but still – is absolutely, already, a major factor in NATO’s ability to deter Russian aggression. Not theoretical. This has already happened.
And in the Black Sea
It was not enough this week for the Ukrainians to smoke Russia’s Baltic Sea oil export capacity. On Wednesday, a Turkish tanker named ALTURA, flagged Sierra Leone, 140,000 tons cargo, loaded with “possibly” Russian crude oil, was attacked by sea drones about 25 kilometers (15.5 miles) from the Bosporus, so just barely in international waters. Reports say she was a well-known Russian shadow fleet component.
The drones damaged the ship’s stern, engine room, and bridge, which is reasonable evidence of sea drones ramming the tanker’s rear end and first-person-view (FPV) drones launched by a sea drone blowing up the command center and bridge, so as to complicate repair and force quicker abandonment. Water was reported coming aboard in the engine room.
The Turkish navy sent rescue assets and evacuated 27 crew without casualties. As of Friday, she was stationary near where she had been hit and surrounded by rescue and naval vessels.
Technically, we don’t know who did this, as no Ukrainian agency has come forward and taken credit, and well, they might avoid it, because attacking third-party-operated tankers in the open seas is one thing, but attacking a Turkish-operated tanker at the gateway to Turkey’s main seaport is another. So far, it seems like the Turks are pretending they have no idea who is behind the attack, and the Ukrainians are pretending they’re just as curious as the Turks to find the culprit, because after all, the waters of the Black Sea should be peaceful. Kyiv and Ankara absolutely agree about that.
The diplomatic messaging, however, was a lot more brutal: If it’s a Russian shadow tanker, and in international waters, the Ukrainians consider it fair game, everyone is warned. The objective doubtless was just as much to prevent the oil from making Russia money as it was to convince insurance companies that covering shadow tankers and their cargo is really risky.
Bombarding Russia – The archer got shot
This is a single tactical incident that is noteworthy primarily because it’s an achievement the Ukrainians have been struggling towards, also for years. HUR is responsible. On the night of March 24, early morning, patrolling HUR drones spotted a Russian Bastion-M launcher loaded with Zircon missiles in Crimea, tracked it moving to a firing position, and then hit it with a strike drone. System destroyed, substantial explosions, seven Russian personnel thought to be killed or injured, a second Bastion launcher thought to be damaged.
This is, of course, an impressive result, but the point isn’t as much the juicy target per se as the fact that the Ukrainians have been hunting furiously and trying all manner of techniques and tricks to try and catch Russian ground launchers of missiles used in missile strikes against Ukraine’s homes and businesses, and a Bastion absolutely is that.
These are specifically the weapons the Ukrainian air defenses have the most trouble stopping, because (with a few exceptions) the only thing the Ukrainians have that could even potentially stop a hypersonic Zircon or a ballistic Iskander-M, is a US-made PAC-3 fired from a Patriot system, and since the Trump administration wants Ukraine to surrender it is dragging its feet on selling Ukraine PAC-3 reloads. Meaning, if either of those two missiles launch, they have an excellent chance of hitting, and there is precious little the Ukrainians have to stop them.
The achievement is that this was a very, very rare case when the Ukrainians managed to hit the launch system right before it launched. This was a night of a big Russian raid, and those Zircons without question had been supposed to go blow something up in Ukraine. It’s hard to say if it was luck or excellent intelligence. Image and here’s a reported grid: 44.779546, 33.758384
Woe is Belgorod
You may recall from last week that Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov of Russia’s Belgorod region was struggling to reconcile his responsibilities to the people of Belgorod, who of all of the Russians are the ones whose power grid is most targeted by the Ukrainians, and his loyalty to the Kremlin, which last week decided the messenger app Telegram was too dangerous for most Russians to use, and that good Russian citizens should use a home-grown app called “Messenger Max” instead.
Anyone interested in Belgorod local news was, therefore, treated to the interesting spectacle of Gladkov attempting to take a public position in favor of Messenger Max, while at the same time warning voters that because Messenger Max contains some foreign coding etc., it can’t transmit air raid warnings, making it pretty useless to the hapless Belgorod voting public which doesn’t want to depend on legacy television and radio or just hearing Ukrainian drones in the air to take to air shelters. Poor Gladkov did his best, but unfortunately, he probably angered both his bosses in Moscow and the average Belgorodian.
So, this week, Gladkov’s office issued an all-Oblast warning to all citizens: if you are going near the Ukrainian border, DO NOT park near military vehicles, and even better, don’t park there at all. This followed, on Monday, reports that Governor Gladkov, responsible regional leader that he is, decided to travel to the village of Smorodino 5 kilometers (3.1 miles) from the Ukrainian border, to show the public he is a man of the people and to hear their concerns, and his vehicle convoy attracted a lot of Ukrainian drones.
Supposedly, one of his bodyguards used a shotgun to deal with one of the drones, but others took out the ambulance accompanying the governor and damaged several other vehicles. Hence the warning, apparently.
Russia bombarding Ukraine
Evidence continues to mount that Russia is, if not exactly running low on missiles, absolutely failing to launch as many in March as it did in February (280, an all-war record, I think). There are more reports that the Russians are using anti-aircraft missiles as “filler” to bulk out their ballistic missile strikes. Since we’ve seen this for four weeks in a row, I feel safe declaring it a trend.
But the Russian intent to bombard the Ukrainians into submission still is visible, although at this point it seems more driven by internal Kremlin reasoning that doesn’t allow anyone to say “It really looks like we Russians have no way to make these Ukrainians quit because even though we think the Ukrainians aren’t a people and don’t have a real country, the Ukrainians clearly disagree and we obviously don’t have the means to force them.”
So, a little like an alcoholic unable to walk past the bar with the “open” sign lit, overnight 23-24/Monday-Tuesday, the Russian Federation launched yet another big missile and drone attack against Ukraine, and once again the Ukrainians appear to have intercepted, jammed, or decoyed most but not all of it. To remind you, this was one night after the Ukrainians took out all those air defense radars and sent close to 300 drones into Russia, so possibly the Russian intent was “revenge.”
The strike breakdown, per the Ukrainian Air Force, was:
- Seven Iskander-M/S-400 ballistic missiles (launch areas – Kursk region, Russia, TOT Donetsk region)
- 18 Kh-101 cruise missiles (launch area – from the airspace over the Caspian Sea)
- Five Iskander-K cruise missiles (launch area – Bryansk region, Russia)
- Four guided aircraft missiles Kh-59/69/31 (launch area – Kursk region, RF, TOT Donetsk region)
392 strike UAVs of the Shahed, Gerbera, Italmas type and drones of other types from the directions: Bryansk, Kursk, Orel, Shatalovo, Millerovo, Primorsko-Akhtarsk – RF, Gvardiyske, TOT AR Crimea, about 250 of them – “Shaheds”
Ukrainian air defense claimed, according to the same source:
- 18 Kh-101 cruise missiles
- Five Iskander-K cruise missiles
- Two Kh-59/69 guided aircraft missiles
- 365 enemy UAVs of various types.
But the wrinkle was that the Russians kept on sending drones throughout Tuesday. I’m not positive this was the intent, but it seems like the Russian objective was to terrorize cities that don’t normally get hit with Shaheds and air raids, including central regions of Ternopil, Ivano-Frankivsk, Chernivtsi, Vinnytsia, Shostka, and Lviv. In the last, a Shahed blew up the roof of a church, which turned out to be a UNESCO World Heritage site. Here’s an article about how UNESCO “forgot” to mention that the damage was done by Russia.
The Ukrainian Air Force claimed that out of 948 drones launched, Ukrainian air defense shot down 906. The most impressive thing about all the air combat, probably, is that in two major strikes in a row, pretty much every Russian cruise missile has been shot down.
So I stand by my previous prediction: As long as Ukraine has sufficient interceptor missiles to take the bite out of the ballistic missiles, and air-to-air and ground-to-air missiles to deal with the cruise missiles, Ukraine’s air defenses will stand, but, I am not confident at all about Patriot missiles and I am unsure about AIM-9 and IRIS-T missiles – that’s from the foreigners.
Final air defense factoid, the AFU said this week that its forces shot down or otherwise disabled about 10,000 attack drones like Shahed and Gerbera, and of those, interceptor drones developed and built in Ukraine accounted for fully a third.
So it’s pretty funny to sit in Ukraine, and watch the Emirates and Omanis and Israelis and the Americans pull their hair out from being attacked by the same Shahed drones around the Gulf.
My guess is, a big-Ish operation involving more than one or two combat jets
This is raw speculation and not hard information. If you’re looking for real factoids with which you can impress your friends and hammer your debate opponents, go on to the pix, I guess. But, for those of you interested in bits of information that might mean something later but don’t really right now, today, the milinfo tracker AMK tracking, which covers US/Israel-Iran as well as the Russo-Ukraine War, reported an uptick in Ukrainian Air Force activity in western Ukraine.
This is a fairly reliable source that seems to have access to confidential air traffic data, AI-processed review of open-source info like video and text, and possibly some kind of NATO-type confidential information roundups. According to them, the Ukrainian Air Force has been conducting a large number of training missions in the Ternopil region and other areas of western Ukraine in recent days, involving “larger numbers of aircraft than usual,” possibly a new batch of F-16 or Mirage-2000 fighters, or they are carrying out large training missions with Su-24 and Su-27 aircraft. Details are currently unclear.
We can discount the Mirages as a possibility because even if new ones were just transferred the reported numbers (up to four) are so low it’s hard to see how they could participate in any activity involving “a lot” of aircraft, and also, Mirage-2000 is used by the Ukrainians primarily as a lone strike aircraft dropping the highly effective, and also French, HAMMER precision-guided bomb.
A new batch of F-16s and pilots is more possible as training is ongoing and for years the word has been the Dutch, Danes and Norwegians will hand over aircraft as soon as Ukraine gets pilots trained to fly them, we haven’t had news of an new graduation group (usually four to six pilots) so maybe that training process just delivered what it was supposed to. However, we also know that the main and final training site for Ukrainian F-16 pilots is an air base in southeast Romania, where they can practice with the real electronic warfare (EW) in the air and even, from time to time, try to track some actual Shahed drones flying up the Danube. That being the case, new F-16 pilots practicing in western Ukraine is a little illogical; if it’s practice that they want, it’s easier and safer in Romania.
So with “new pilots and aircraft” not being the first logical explanation, the question is, of course, what then? What possible, complex air operation could the AFU be contemplating that would require “a lot” of aircraft and more than usual practice? I know what I think, it’s so obvious I suspect the AFU may want me to think that. But if you read this far, your speculation in the comments is much appreciated. Pic of an F-16 because.
Reprinted from Kyiv Post’s Special Military Correspondent Stefan Korshak’s blog. You can read his blog here.
The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.