Latest news with #Fighterbomber
Boston Globe
7 days ago
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Large-scale Ukrainian attack targets air bases in Russia, authorities say
Those details could not be independently verified, but the statement from the ministry came hours after an official in Ukraine's security services, known as the SBU, said that a large-scale drone operation was underway. Advertisement The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive intelligence operation, said that dozens of aircraft were damaged. It was not immediately possible to independently confirm that claim, but Russian military bloggers were quick to opine on what appeared to be a significant failure of defenses. 'Today will later be called a black day for Russian long-range aviation,' read a post on the Telegram channel called Fighterbomber, which is believed to be run by Capt. Ilya Tumanov of the Russian army. It added: 'And the day is not over yet.' The deputy head of Ukraine's presidential office, Iryna Vereshchuk, said that the security services had 'set a new bar of skill in conducting large-scale combat operations on enemy territory.' Advertisement 'This is not a knockout, but a very serious knockdown for the enemy,' she wrote on Telegram. Earlier Sunday, Ukraine's military said that a Russian missile attack on a training base killed at least 12 soldiers and wounded more than 60 others -- a rare statement acknowledging casualties within its ranks. The commander of Ukraine's ground forces, Maj. Gen. Mykhailo Drapatyi, submitted his resignation after the attack on the base, in the Dnipro region, saying in a statement that he felt a 'personal sense of responsibility for the tragedy.' 'An army in which commanders bear personal responsibility for the lives of their people is alive. An army where no one is held accountable for losses dies from within,' he said. Ukraine's military said it was investigating the circumstances, but emphasized that there was not a mass gathering at the time of the strike -- an apparent attempt to demonstrate lessons learned from previous incidents. 'At the time the air-raid alert was announced, all personnel were in shelters, except for those who may not have had time to reach it,' Vitalii Sarantsev, a spokesperson for Ukraine's ground forces, said in an interview with Ukrainian news media. Ukraine's military does not typically disclose official casualty figures, which are treated as a state secret and are a highly sensitive topic in the country. Past attacks with large numbers of military casualties -- like when a Russian missile killed soldiers gathered for an awards ceremony in southern Ukraine in late 2023 -- have raised questions about security protocols. The dueling attacks came on the eve of another round of peace talks in Istanbul, proposed by Moscow. While Ukraine had insisted it see a promised memorandum outlining Russia's ceasefire terms before sending any officials to the talks, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced Sunday that his country would in fact send a delegation. Advertisement He did not say whether Ukraine had received the memorandum. In a post on social media, Zelenskyy said only that he had met with senior leadership and 'defined our positions' before the talks Monday in Istanbul, where Defense Minister Rustem Umerov would lead Ukraine's delegation. Ukrainian officials have accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of stalling for time in the negotiations. Hours before the strike on the military training base, Russia launched what Ukrainian officials said was the largest combined overnight aerial assault on the country since the start of the war. Ukraine's air force said that Russia launched 472 drones and seven missiles overnight. It said that the majority of the drones and three of the incoming missiles were intercepted, but that at least 18 targets were struck. While the air force did not provide further details on what was struck, local officials in the Kyiv region said that at least 10 homes had sustained damage. Local authorities also reported damage in the Kirovohrad region of central Ukraine and in the northeastern Kharkiv region. This article originally appeared in
New York Post
04-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Post
Ukraine drone takes out Russian fighter jet over Black Sea for first time: Kyiv
A Ukrainian drone has taken down a Russian Su-30 fighter jet over the Black Sea for the first time, Kyiv intelligence officials said. The Ukrainian Magura drone destroyed the Moscow Su-30 on Friday near the port of Novorossiysk, where Kyiv claims Russia holds a Black Sea fleet, according to Ukraine. The crew of the doomed jet is believed to have been rescued. 'This is the first time in the world that a combat aircraft has been destroyed by a marine drone,' the Defense Intelligence of Ukraine said Saturday. Advertisement 5 A Ukrainian drone took down a Russian Su-30 fighter jet over the Black Sea for the first time. Defence Intelligence of Ukraine/YouTube 'The Russian Su-30 — a multi-role fighter jet with an estimated value of $50 million — was engulfed in flames mid-air before crashing into the sea, where the ruthless domain of Neptune claimed it,' the agency added. Kyiv's claims were echoed by Russian military bloggers, who have become a key source of information along the frontlines as independent news outlets are not entrenched in the combat zones. Advertisement 'The Ukrainians brought more than three dozen drones… After jet was hit, the crew ended up in the water, surrounded by enemy drones,' a blogger with the handle Fighterbomber wrote on Telegram. Another pro-Russian military blogger who goes by Rybar said a Russian jet was hit and that the pilots were 'picked up by civilian sailors.' 5 This 'multi-role fighter jet with an estimated value of $50 million — was engulfed in flames mid-air before crashing into the sea, where the ruthless domain of Neptune claimed it,' the Defense Intelligence of Ukraine said. AP The Kremlin has yet to comment on the incident. Advertisement Amid the strike, officials in Novorossiysk declared a state of emergency, claiming a Ukraine drone attack injured five people in the city and damaged a grain terminal in the busy trade port. Kyiv touted the successful strike against the fighter jet, noting that it followed another first when its naval drones were used to take out two Russian helicopters on the last day of 2024. Ukraine's Magura V5 missile drone stands as the latest UAV innovation from Kyiv, a development that has allowed its forces to bombard Moscow's war fleet along the Black Sea. 5 The burning wreckage of a downed Russian fighter jet in the Kharkiv region in 2022. General Staff of the Armed Force Advertisement 5 Workers clean up around burnt cars in the residential area following Russia's drone attack in Kyiv, Ukraine. AP 5 Su-30SM fighter jets during joint exercises of the armed forces of Russia and Belarus in 2022. Russian Defence Ministry/AFP via Last year, Ukrainian drones sank the Ivanovets guided-missile ship in the Black Sea after Russia's withdrawal from a maritime truce. Drones have also aided in Russia's invasion of Ukraine, with Moscow's latest bombardment injuring at least 11 people in Kyiv by striking residential buildings across the capital, officials said.
Forbes
02-04-2025
- Politics
- Forbes
One Of Russia's Swing-Wing Tu-22M Bombers Just Crashed
A Tu-22M burns on the ground in 2023. A Russian air force Tupolev Tu-22M bomber crashed in Usolsky District, in eastern Russia 2,700 miles from Ukraine. It's probably the fifth of the 139-foot, four-person bombers the Russians have lost in the 37 months since they widened their war on Ukraine. That's nearly 10 percent of the pre-war fleet of around 60 swing-wing Tu-22Ms, updated versions of Cold War bombers that carry anti-ship and land-attack cruise missiles and which, from the Ukrainian perspective, are terror weapons. These days, they primarily target Ukrainian cities. Their victims are usually civilians. Fighterbomber, the unofficial Telegram channel of the Russian air force, confirmed the crash on Wednesday. 'Crew is being searched for,' the channel reported. The Tu-22M force has had a hard war. Before Wednesday's crash, the Russian air force had lost four of the bombers—another that crashed, one that was shot down and two that were destroyed or at least badly damaged by Ukrainian drones. Ukraine's long-range drone strike force has focused much of its attention on Russian bomber bases. A triple-tap series of raids between January and March targeting Engels air base in southern Russia, 400 miles from Ukraine, destroyed a huge stock of bomber-launched cruise missiles costing nearly $1 billion. A flaming Tu-22M falls to the ground in April 2024. The Tu-22Ms almost always conduct standoff raids, launching their cruise missiles from as far away as 600 miles. This keeps the Tu-22Ms out of range of Ukraine's surface-to-air missiles—usually. But that doesn't mean the bomber raids are totally safe for their crews. Last April, a Ukrainian SAM battery—likely an aged but potent S-200—hit a Tu-22M flying over southern Russia after launching its Kh-22 cruise missile. Merely carrying a 1960s-vintage Kh-22 can be dangerous. 'Nothing says fun like flying around with an ancient missile containing ~4 tons of hypergolic fuel,' aviation expert Bill Sweetman quipped. But for all the risk and all the losses the Tu-22M community has endured while terrorizing Ukrainian civilians, there's no reason to believe it will stand down—not even temporarily. The Russian air force has been losing bombers at a rate of just one or two a year. It has more than enough Tu-22Ms and larger Tupolev Tu-95s and Tu-160s to bombard Ukraine for the foreseeable future.
Forbes
29-03-2025
- Politics
- Forbes
Russia Is Jamming Ukraine's Precision Glide Bombs
A Ukrainian Su-27 drops precision glide bombs. Ukrainian jammers are throwing Russia's satellite-guided bombs off course, significantly blunting what was once one of Russia's main advantages over Ukraine—its bigger air force with its even bigger stock of winged glide bombs. But jamming cuts both ways, and now Russian electronic warfare is throwing Ukraine's satellite-guided bombs off course. 'They have brought in new electronic warfare equipment,' one Ukrainian military blogger noted. 'They can really interfere with a strike.' 'The GPS of the bombs can go out,' the blogger added. But Ukraine should be able to cope—with bombs whose guidance systems are self-contained. It's not yet clear that Russian jamming is as widespread and effective as Ukrainian jamming. Ukraine has generally maintained an electronic edge over Russia, swiftly fielding well-made radio noisemakers that can drown out Russian communications. Regardless, it's certainly not good news for Ukraine that it can no longer strike, with 100-percent reliability, Russian targets with precision glide-bombs such as the French-made Hammer and the American-made Small Diameter Bomb. Most recently, Ukrainian air force Sukhoi Su-27 fighters have been hurling the bombs at bridges in Belgorod Oblast in western Russia, aiming to cut off Russian troops in the oblast's border region, where Ukrainian brigades have launched small-scale incursions. Accurate air support could mean the difference between the incursions succeeding and failing. A Russian Su-30 drops a precision glide bomb. It's a truism in warfare that every measure has a countermeasure, and every countermeasure has a countercountermeasure. When it comes to precision bombing, the main countermeasure is jamming that can interfere with satellite guidance. The main countercountermeasure is navigation that doesn't depend on satellites. That usually means an inertial navigation system: an entirely self-contained system that tracks its own location by way of gyroscopes and accelerometers. 'The future belongs to autonomous INS,' announced Fighterbomber, the unofficial Telegram channel of the Russian air force. The best Ukrainian munitions—American-made Joint Direct Attack Munition glide bombs and French-made Hammer glide bombs—have backup inertial navigation systems. By contrast, Russia's own inertial guidance backups tend to be inaccurate. In a 2022 essay for Proceedings, the professional journal of the U.S. Navy, analyst Mark Schneider concluded Russian missiles are often a tenth as accurate as their makers claim. Filling the air with radio noise, the Ukrainians and Russians could force each other to rely on precision bombs that don't need to talk to satellites. As long as Ukraine's INS is better that Russia's INS, the mutual electronic suppression should benefit Ukraine.
Forbes
23-03-2025
- Politics
- Forbes
Ukraine's Jammers Confuse Russia's Glide Bombs. Watch One Stray.
A KAB in mid-flight. Fighterbomber, the unofficial Telegram channel of the Russian air force, has claimed the air force's widely feared KAB or UMPK satellite-guided glide bombs are accurate to within 15 feet of a target. So it's noteworthy when one of the winged bombs, which can glide 25 miles or farther and deliver hundreds or even thousands of pounds of explosives, misses by a wide margin. A miss might mean that Ukrainian jamming, which can disrupt the radio signal between a KAB and its associated navigation satellites, is working—and proliferating. A recording of a Russian drone feed, posted online on or just before Saturday, seems to depict the effects of Ukrainian jamming in real time. In the video, the drone is circling a structure somewhere near the front line in Ukraine—potentially a base for Ukrainian troops—and apparently preparing to assess the damage from a KAB strike that's already underway. The drone has its crosshairs over one particular structure. But when the KAB explodes, it's hundreds of yards away—and in an open field. Wide misses are reportedly becoming common all along the 700-mile front line as more and better Ukrainian jammers cover more of the most important sectors. A KAB explodes harmlessly. 'The golden era of the divine UMPK turned out to be short-lived,' Fighterbomber noted last month. 'The bombs are still flying,' Fighterbomber reported. 'But there's a catch. All satellite-guided correction systems have left the chat.' And for one main reason: Ukrainian radio jammers have become so effective, and so numerous, that they 'saturate the front line.' The glide bombs can't communicate with the GLONASS satellite constellation, Russia's less sophisticated and less expansive answer to the United States' own GPS satellite constellation. Without a steady connection for course correction, the glide bombs tend to stray and harmlessly explode on some field—just like that one video depicts. It seems Ukraine is deploying more than one type of jammer. KABs may be losing accuracy all along the front line, but one leading Ukrainian jammer manufacturer has copped to covering just a few key sectors, including Kharkiv in the north and Zaporizhzhia in the south. Night Watch's new Lima jammer isn't a traditional model that simply blasts radio noise toward the enemy. 'We use digital interference,' a representative of the 10-person Night Watch electronic warfare team told Forbes. It's 'a combination of jamming, spoofing and information cyber attack on the navigation receiver.' 'After the deployment of the [electronic warfare] system, the accuracy of the bombings first decreased and then, realizing the ineffectiveness of this method of destruction and the impossibility of achieving the goal, the enemy stopped shelling regional centers altogether,' the rep claimed. Some KABs are still flying, of course—the recent video proves that. But they may be targeting sectors where the Ukrainians haven't yet deployed their best new jammers. As the jammers arrive, the bombs should begin to stray off course—and blow up fields instead of buildings full of Ukrainian troops.
