The overnight drone raid on the Russian air force’s Engels bomber base in southern Russia, 300 miles from the front line in Ukraine, apparently ignited the sprawling base’s huge stock of munitions and triggered a succession of explosions that blew the roofs off of homes in the surrounding community.
The devastating raid, the third in a 10-week series targeting Engels and its bomber regiments, may have destroyed some of the cruise missiles that Russian bombers—including Tupolev Tu-95s and Tu-160s—routinely fire at Ukrainian cities.
In that sense, the Engels raids represent yet another attempt by Ukrainian forces to get “left of the boom,” to borrow U.S. Army slang. To prevent roadside bomb ambushes in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Americans learned to get ahead of the problem and hunt down the men who built and distributed the bombs. They aimed to get “left” of an attack on a left-to-right timeline.
Struggling to intercept Russian bombs, missiles and drones in the moments before they strike—in part due to a shortage of the best American- and European-made air-defense missiles—the Ukrainians are also aiming left of the boom. More Ukrainian drone and missile strikes are targeting drone factories, munitions warehouses and aviation fuel depots on Russian soil.
On or just before March 13, long-range attack drones belonging to the Ukrainian defense intelligence agency struck a hidden drone manufacturing facility in Obukhovo, just outside Moscow 300 miles from the border with Ukraine. And in April, Ukraine sortied one of its then-new Aeroprakt A-22 sport plane drones to strike a drone plant in Yelabuga, 550 miles east of Moscow.
Where are the air defenses?
The utter failure of Russian air defenses to adapt to the threat from small drones makes Ukraine’s preemptive strikes possible. What appeared to be an eight-foot-long UkrSpecSystems PD-1 drone was spotted flying low over Saratov just before or after Engels exploded.
The PD-1 may have delivered a small explosive payload as part of the strike. Or it may have conducted surveillance on behalf of the attack drone crews. Either way, it motored unmolested over one of the Russian air force’s most important bases.
Gaps in Russian and Ukrainian air defenses are the untold story behind Russia’s ongoing bombardment of Ukrainian cities and Ukraine’s left-of-boom drone raids meant to blunt the bombardment.
With just six U.S.-made Patriot surface-to-air missile batteries and two European-made SAMP/T batteries, Ukraine can’t protect all of its population centers. It has no choice but to target the Russian bombers’ fuel and munitions. But the air base raids are only as successful as Russia’s own air defenses are unsuccessful.
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