As Americans were waking up to the news that Donald Trump had won the Tuesday presidential election, at least one 21-foot robotic sport plane rigged for remote control and laden with explosives motored over Kaspiysk, an anchorage of the Russian Caspian Fleet in Dagestan, 700 miles from the front line in Ukraine.
As Russian sailors dove for cover, one of the Aeroprakt A-22s—apparently operated by the Ukrainian intelligence directorate—plowed into a clutch of warships moored side-by-side along a pier.
According to Anton Gerashchenko, a former advisor to the interior ministry in Kyiv, the explosion damaged three ships, including two Gepard-class frigates—the fleet’s biggest ships—as well as a smaller Buyan corvette. The damaged vessels may account for nearly a third of the Caspian Fleet’s strength.
The 700-mile raid isn’t the deepest strike by Ukraine’s A-22 drones, but it’s close. Back in May, one of the 100-mile-per-hour drones struck an oil refinery in the city of Salavat, in Russia more than 800 miles from the front line.
The modified sport planes, which were developed and built in Ukraine, are expedients. Ukraine’s biggest allies—the United States, the United Kingdom and France—have consistently withheld permission for Ukraine to use American, British and French cruise and ballistic missiles against targets inside Russia.
In order to retaliate against Russia’s own strikes on Ukrainian cities and bases, the Ukrainians have had to improvise—with an array of locally-made drones and surface-to-air missiles tweaked for ground strikes. Now, three months before Trump re-enters the White House, that improvisation could assume even greater importance.
As reluctant as U.S. Pres. Joe Biden has been to fully support Ukraine’s deep-strike campaign, Trump is likely to be even more reluctant—if not openly hostile. The Republican Party increasingly favors Russia over Ukraine. Trump, a convicted felon, threatened to let the Russians do “whatever the Hell they want” in Europe.
Ukrainian Pres. Volodymyr Zelensky is doing his best to curry favor with Trump, effusively congratulating the president-elect on Wednesday. “We look forward to an era of a strong United States of America under President Trump’s decisive leadership,” Zelensky stated.
“Right now, there is a lot of uncertainty about Trump’s impact on the Ukraine war,” wrote Samuel Ramani, a professor of international relations at Oxford University. But if Trump does as Republicans have threatened to do and cuts Ukraine off from U.S. aid, Ukraine will still have ways of prosecuting its war of survival.
That A-22 droning over the Caspian Sea Fleet’s anchorage underscores how quickly Ukraine has moved to expand its portfolio of locally made deep-strike weapons. At the onset of Russia’s wider war on Ukraine in February 2022, the Ukrainians had zero operational deep-strike weapons. Now they have several kinds.
More are coming. Ukrainian industry, partially funded by Lithuania, recently completed development of the turbojet-powered Palanytsia “rocket drone,” a hybrid cruise missile that ranges as far as 400 miles.
That’s not as far as an A-22 drone flies. But where the sport plane drones are hand-made in small quantities on the basis of existing airframes, the Palanytsia can be mass-produced from scratch by Ukraine’s burgeoning drone industry.
The Ukrainians initially used the Palanytsia in combat in August, striking unspecified targets in Russian-occupied Crimea. “I think this will be a game-changer,” Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s technology minister, said of the new missile.
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