There’s no use hiding from enemy drones if the drones watch you scurry into your hiding spot. On or just before Monday, a squad of around a dozen Russian infantry marched into a road underpass they’d transformed into an underground base in Oleshky, in southern Ukraine’s Kherson Oblast.
The underpass base with its concrete roof and earthen walls might’ve sheltered the Russians from the Ukrainian drones that are everywhere all the time all along the 800-mile front line of Russia’s three-year wider war on Ukraine. The problem for the Russians was that a drone was watching as the troops sought shelter. The individual Russians, each radiating 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit of natural heat, stood out on the drones’ infrared sensor.
Shortly after the squad marched into its base, a Ukrainian air force Mikoyan MiG-29 fighter from the 40th Tactical Aviation Brigade lobbed two French-made Hammer glide bombs at the underpass. Both bombs nailed the entrance with precision measured in feet.
It’s unclear exactly how many Russians were still inside the improvised bunker at the moment of impact. It’s equally unclear how many may have survived. But it’s worth pondering what the blast waves from two 550-pound bombs would do to human bodies packed just yards away inside what amounted to an earthen pressure cooker.
The instantaneous liquidation of a Russian infantry squad might not be big news elsewhere along the front line in Ukraine and western Russia, but in Oleshky it qualifies as a major development. Kherson Oblast has been fairly quiet since traumatized Ukrainian marines withdrew from the fishing village of Krynky on the otherwise Russian-held left bank of the Dnipro River, which threads through Kherson and roughly demarcates the line of contact between Ukrainian and Russian forces.
The main action in Kherson since the brutal Krynky battle ended has been unusually cruel, even by the standards of Russia’s unprovoked war on Ukraine. Russian drones and artillery routinely target Ukrainian civilians in Kherson, blowing them up as they walk to work or the market.
The most recent killing was typical. On Monday night, a Russian drone bombed a man in Beryslav, 30 miles east of Kherson city. “He died on the spot from his injuries,” the Ukrainian Center for Defense Strategies reported.
In a sense, the dual Hammer blow on that Russian infantry squad was revenge for countless civilian deaths. In another sense, it was an obvious application of the Ukrainian air force’s precious strike assets—its ex-European and ex-Soviet warplanes that have been modified to carry Western-made precision munitions such as the Hammer.
Ukraine gets just 50 Hammers a month from France, and must use them carefully. But a dozen Russian infantry packed into an underpass, with no chance of escape and little chance of survival, are probably worth two Hammers.
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