A rare video depicting a Ukrainian air force Sukhoi Su-27 fighter lobbing American-made glide bombs at a Russian bridgehead in western Russia’s Kursk Oblast seems to confirm that the Ukrainians are dropping the winged, GPS-guided GBU-39 bombs—each weighing 250 pounds—in quartets, and lobbing them at high angles to extend their range.
The video depicts a twin-engine Su-27—one of around 40 of the supersonic jets left in Ukrainian service—climbing from low altitude over a green landscape and releasing four GBU-39s from a single pylon under its left wing. As the bombs fall away, the pilot immediately banks and turns to put as much distance as possible between the jet and any Russian air defenses in the area.
This method—fly low, climb, release bombs, retreat—minimizes a warplane’s exposure to enemy fire without seriously constraining a bomb’s range. Released from high altitude, a GPS-guided GBU-39 might travel farther than 60 miles under its pop-out wings. But flying high in plan view of enemy radars is dangerous for all but the stealthiest aircraft. An Su-27 isn’t stealthy at all.
So Ukrainian Su-27s, as well as similarly equipped Mikoyan MiG-29s, line up for their glide-bombing runs from low altitude, where the terrain can mask them from radars. At the last second before pickling their bombs, the fighters pitch upward to lend the munitions upward trajectory. Deployed like that, a GBU-39 might range 40 miles or so.
That clearly has been sufficient to keep Ukraine’s MiGs and Sukhois out of harm’s way as they toss their glide bombs. While the Russians have been able to strike an alarming number of Ukrainian jets on the ground at their bases this year, including several Su-27s, surface-to-air kills are rarer.
The Su-27 depicted in the recent video was apparently targeting one of the many pontoon bridges Russian engineers built over the Seym River in Kursk back in August, during the Russians’ initial efforts to contain a powerful Ukrainian force that invaded the oblast early that month.
The bridge raids complicated, but ultimately did not prevent, the Russians’ effort to consolidate their defenses south of the Seym. Today, the locus of the fighting in Kursk is miles east of the river.
It’s unclear where Ukraine’s low-flying glide bombers are focusing their efforts today, as Russia’s wider war on Ukraine grinds toward its 34th month.
Russia’s own glide-bombing campaign is much bigger than Ukraine’s, as the Russian air force has many more jets and many more bombs than the Ukrainian air force and can sustainably lob around 100 bombs a day.
The Ukrainians by contrast can expend maybe 10 or a dozen glide bombs a day, split between American-made GBU-39s, French-made Hammers and potentially new Ukrainian models.
So the Ukrainians tend to prioritize high-value targets such as bridges, command posts and isolated pockets of fortified Russian troops rather than indiscriminately bombing trenches and front-line cities like the Russians do.
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