A Ukrainian air force jet tossed four precision bombs at a platoon from the Russian army’s 60th Motor Rifle Brigade sheltering in Elizavetovka, a village on the Russian side of the border in Kursk Oblast.
The target: a drone team whose explosive unmanned aerial vehicles have been hounding Ukrainian forces in nearby Sumy Oblast. “As a result,” the Ukrainian general staff reported on Friday, the Russian position “was destroyed.”
The general staff didn’t specify exactly what combination of jets and bombs took out the Russian drone team, but the video feed from a Ukrainian surveillance drone offers some clues. Four munitions struck in the same small area in quick succession, pointing to a salvo of precision glide bombs—perhaps American-made Small Diameter Bombs, which the Ukrainian air force’s Mikoyan MiG-29 fighters carry in clutches of four.
The 250-pound SDB ranges as far as 60 miles under pop-out wings and GPS guidance when released from high altitude. But Ukrainian MiGs tend to stick close to the ground to avoid Russian air-defenses, unavoidably reducing the reach of their bombs.
Whether and to what extent the Friday bombardment suppresses Russian drone raids targeting Sumy remains to be seen. We do have some baseline for comparison as statistics roll in. On Wednesday night, Russian forces launched 123 Shahed attack drones at Kyiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Poltava, Chernihiv and Sumy Oblasts.
Of course, the Shahed is a heavier drone weighing 400 pounds or so and ranging as far as 1,600 miles. The proximity of the 60th Motor Rifle Brigade’s position to the border with Ukraine—just two miles—implies the brigade was launching smaller drones from the position. Perhaps first-person-view drones weighing just a few pounds and ranging five miles or so.
In any event, the Ukrainian attack may be part of a wider Ukrainian effort to get “left of the boom”—to borrow a U.S. military term—and defeat Russian drones by targeting their operators. This effort is becoming more urgent by the day as the Russians deploy more fiber-optic FPV drones, which send and receive signals via long cables rather than radio.
The Ukrainians are adept at jamming radio signals, but jammers don’t work against fiber-optics. The Ukrainian 95th Air Assault Brigade learned that the hard way last month when a swarm of fiber-optic drones defeated the brigade’s assault on the village of Berdin in Kursk Oblast.
Expect more Ukrainian air raids on Russian drone teams as unjammable drones proliferate. If there’s a major constraint on these raids, it’s the supply of bombs. Ukraine’s SDBs are made in America—and U.S. Pres. Donald Trump has suggested making further aid to Ukraine contingent on Ukraine giving the United States access to its deposits of valuable rare earth minerals.
While Kyiv might be amenable to that trade as part of a wider security U.S.-Ukrainian agreement, Trump has also unilaterally begun negotiating with Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin to end Russia’s wider war on Ukraine. But the Trump administration’s opening position essentially grants Russia many of its war aims, including Russian control over vast swathes of Ukrainian territory and a U.S. ban on Ukraine joining NATO.
If Ukraine rejects any peace deal resulting from Trump’s two-way talks with Putin—a likely outcome given how much that deal would reward Russia and punish Ukraine—any parallel agreement between Kyiv and Washington trading minerals for military aid could collapse. And the supply of bombs could collapse with it.
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