OPINION: Big News That Wasn’t, It’s a New World in Strategic Bombardment, Spinning the ‘Debris’

It’s been quite an eventful week although, since the combat lines haven’t moved that much, I guess it’s possible, depending on where you were and the quality of your information feeds, that maybe it looks like the war has stalled and nothing much is happening.

That’s not the way it looks here.

I’ll get to the big news in the second half of this review, in part, because the “minor news” this week also is pretty important and under normal circumstances in “normal” wars involving NATO states, it all would be a pretty big deal.

The big news that still isn’t the BIGGEST news this week, in no particular order:

EU keeps the lights on

The EU committed to lending Ukraine €35 billion, this will go to servicing debt, financing the Ukrainian government, supporting the power grid, and so on. The entire Ukrainian state budget – the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) and Syrsky, Budanov and the Main Directorate of Intelligence (HUR), the national police, Chornobyl support, a national health service handling tens of thousands of war injuries, all of it – for 2024, is the equivalent of about $90 billion. It is hard to overstate the significance of this financial lifeline, and I point out that it’s euros from European taxpayers, not dollars from US taxpayers.

US to send military aid, but in dribs and drabs

The White House just said that the somewhere between $5.5 and $6 billion in promised and Congress-budgeted American military aid that was finally budgeted back in April (after six months of zero US aid to Ukraine, during a hot war, because of Congressional deadlock mostly over border law) – and that by the legislation had to be spent by the end of October – will, in fact, be spent, and Ukraine will get its stuff. Just later. Like in months. Main reason appears to be the US military doesn’t have sufficient stocks of some categories of ammo the Ukrainians really need. This almost certainly will be mostly high-end munitions like Patriot missiles, M30/HIMARS rockets, and possibly ATACMS missiles. But also, without doubt, it will be 155mm shell. Reports are deliveries will come, but they will be slow, to protect US stocks from depletion, and volumes won’t be enough to give the AFU firepower advantage on the battlefield.

Other Topics of Interest

Russian Strikes Kill Three, Wound 24 in Kharkiv

An apartment building, bakery, and stadium were hit by the Russian strikes.

AGM-154s and JASSMs

The DC/Washington rumor mill is widely reporting that next month/later this month the Americans will release another $375-400 million in arms assistance to Ukraine, so about twice the monthly allotments we’ve seen since assistance restarted in May.

The package will probably contain all of the above, but also, a not-yet-specified quantity of AGM-154 glide munition, which are a sort of semi-cruise missile bomb dropped off an airplane.

They fly about 100 miles, or 160-ish kilometers, and are supposedly super-duper accurate. This is nice for Ukraine to have, but the word is that not many will be delivered fast, first because of the need to maintain US stocks, but also because the Ukrainian pilots need to be trained to use the weapon, and maybe also, existing Soviet-era aircraft need to be modified to launch the weapon:

It’s worth noting that with a range of 160 kilometers, in serious quantity, in early 2023, JASSM, or even AGM-154, in the hands of the AFU might have kicked Russia out of most of Ukraine.

Now it’s Fall 2024 and the really valuable stuff the Russians had within the AGM–154 range envelope was shifted deeper into Russia probably six months ago or more. There are still things to hit – the Russian army is big – but don’t expect a major effect from AGM–154. Just incremental.

For the record, were the US right now to hand over several hundred cruise missiles like JASSM to Ukraine – which is close to fantasy because the US needs full stocks in case of wars involving the American military – then Ukraine would right now gain the capacity to launch a long-range, potentially crippling strike against the Russian military machine.

However, that’s not planned nor even being discussed.

France delivered on vow to train pilots

France training Ukrainian combat pilots turned out not to be just talk – in this particular case, we have a major NATO state that kept a secret and kept to a commitment. Back in March, Paris said they were planning to train Ukrainian pilots (they also said they were going to give Ukraine Mirage2000 fighters, which the Ukrainians would use as strike aircraft), and since there were no reports after that, people like me naturally concluded Quai d’Orsay was just blowing smoke.

That turned out, apparently, to be an incorrect conclusion. This week, the French Air Force proudly publicized a graduation ceremony by future Ukrainian combat pilots who had just completed six weeks of preparation training on Alpha Jets. No information on how many there were, but judging by the lineup, it’s a cohort of one to two dozen at most, and maybe as few as five to 10. Their next stop is Romania, where they will train on F-16s. I’ll no doubt go into all sorts of detail about how the Europeans are effectively creating an F-16 combat pilot training program from scratch, with very little assistance from the US. But short-to-medium term, the really big news here is this is targeting the big bottleneck in putting more Ukrainian F-16s into the sky: Too few trained pilots.

Russians won’t kick Ukrainians out of Kursk anytime soon

In the Kursk sector we have two pretty significant developments. First, the highly mobile warfare by both sides seems to have settled down and particularly, the “big” Russian offensive that was supposed to liberate every square meter of Holy Russia occupied by the Ukrainian invader, has failed. Given the force ratios, there’s now no way the Russians can do it, and with the onset of the Fall rains and the swamp flooding and mud that always goes along with it in this part of the world, it’s pretty likely that where major formations are right now, is where they’ll be until later November at the earliest. Second, and connected with the first, more reports are coming in that the Russian forces caught on the wrong side of the Seym River are struggling for supplies and certainly some of them are straight military definition cut off.

Isolated Seym River pocket

There are unconfirmed reports of “hundreds” of Russian paratroopers isolated in the town of Glushkovo, and video of small groups of Russian POWs, keeps trickling in. There is some Ukrainian speculation out there that the entire Russian force in this pocket, potentially a couple of thousand to several thousand men, has mostly gone to ground and is making its way back to safety on foot. None of that is confirmed. But, in terms of what happened this week in Kursk sector, more evidence came in that leads me to suspect the basic Ukrainian operational concept was solid, the isolation of the Seym River “pocket” was intentional, and it might work. Map swiped from the internet attached – that’s more or less how I guess the state of battle is at the moment.

Russians inch forward toward Pokrovsk at very heavy cost

In the Pokrovsk sector, the Russians seem to have girded themselves up and launched at least two substantial armored attacks, one in the 72nd Brigade sector and one in the 46th Brigade sector, and in both cases the Russians got their heads handed to them. Thirty to forty vehicle attacks, about two-thirds lost in a couple of hours of fighting – no ground gained by the Russians.

The tactics used by the Ukrainians, literally, are more than a year old (so they have a lot of practice): (1.) Let the Russians come out into the open (2.) Wait until they hit minefields or a choke point (3.) Open up with what you’ve got, first artillery but also anti-tank guided missile (ATGM), and first-person view (FPV) drones if you have them. The objective here is to stop vehicles out in the open (4.) FPV drones come in to hunt the infantry on foot and bomber drones come in to set the stopped vehicles on fire (5.) Whatever is still intact/alive by nightfall gets a visit by a Baba Yaga/night doctor heavy drone which geopositions itself over the survivor and drops explosives (6) What the nighttime drones don’t destroy get targeted by drones with “specialist” munitions, like bomber drones that dump thermite or white phosphorus into a trench or bunker to burn up people inside, or an FPV with a fuel area/heavy explosive charge, to blow them up.

Let me be clear, this is not NATO, but also, isn’t the Ukrainians faking it. This is how the AFU, as an organization, has conducted deliberate defense for at least the last eighteen months.

For practical purposes, this is doctrine and the state of modern defensive tactics in conventional war.

Nursing home attack

On the scale of death and suffering of the Russo-Ukrainian War it was a small incident, but also it was an indicator. On Wednesday – and I suggest you bear it in mind if you read on to the next section – the Russian Air Force dropped a glider bomb on a Ukrainian old person’s home. Since it was inside Sumy city, the strike and its aftermath was very well-documented.

My newspaper’s report is here.

News from Kyiv

On the Kyiv front – which is certainly not the Hauptpunkt, but still we get our share of missiles and kamikaze drones – without question, the big news is that one of the city metro lines, which had been shut down for about nine months because crappy post–Soviet engineering resulted in tunnel flooding two decades after initial construction, got fixed.

For Kyiv residents previously stranded outside the city metro network by the break, *ahem*  , the repair, is a huge jump in quality of life. Real estate owners along the blue line probably saw the value of their property jump 20–30% overnight, although, that was just recovery from the market value hit owners took when the blue line shut down.

Also on the Kyiv front, it’s been very smokey outside due to traditional Fall grass fires and wind patterns. A very small positive that the full-scale war in Ukraine has brought, in this connection, is that foreign media isn’t focusing on Ukraine in reference to the “radioactive smoke” from fires in, or near, or maybe approaching the Chornobyl zone, and how nasty Ukrainian radioactive smoke might pollute pristine clean Europe. It’s not worth the death and destruction but it’s something.

And finally, on the Kyiv front, the water pollution from Russia’s Kursk region that has been killing all the fish, and that started, as a matter of fact, somewhere in the Seym River drainage basin, has made its way via the medium-sized Desna into the mighty Dnipro, and so the Ukrainian capital.

We are being told the water in taps is still safe to drink but better not to swim in or fish in the Dnipro. 

Here’s a Kyiv Post report on that.

And now for the BIG news…

If you attack Russian ammo dumps and some explosions register like earthquakes, it’s probably working

OK, to start this section off, when I say something like “biggest-ever” or “record” or “in history,” it’s not hyperbole or splodgy-emotion, it’s just true and verifiable as far as I can see.

This week was Ukraine’s most successful, in terms of strategic bombardment, of the entire war. This was because they hit three major – I’m talking federally-run, national-scale – Russian ammunition dumps in six days and some of the results were spectacular.

I chose that adjective deliberately.

There are different reports out there of what weaponry, but the weight of the reports is in favor of massed use, by the Ukrainians, of jet-propelled drones. By “massed,” I mean, in two cases at least 100 aircraft, and possibly closer to 150, were launched. The Ukrainian government and HUR/Budanov have claimed responsibility for the first strike.

As of Saturday afternoon, there were three big attacks:

One.

Torpopets base, in Tver’ region, on Wednesday.

This base looks like it got nearly wiped off the face of the map. One of the advantages of war reporting in the 21st century is there really are no major secrets.

It’s absolutely confirmed this was, first, the single biggest ammunition dump in the entire Russian Federation. It specializes(d) in storing rocket and missiles of all types. There is no need whatsoever to pay attention to Kremlin declarations about minor fires, we have satellite imaging of the fires’ heat signature and photo imaging of the damage.

When I wrote the strike up on Wednesday it was clear two-thirds of the site, meaning potentially 20,000 TONS of high explosives, were blown up. There’s even open-source confirmation by seismic monitoring agencies.

More than a dozen explosions registered as low-grade earthquakes. Not making that up.

In the 48 hours after writing that up, it became possible to read that among the “missiles” stored at this site were, possibly, North Korean ballistic missiles sent to Russia in defiance of UN bans and mean words from Washington, and Iranian ballistic missiles also sent to Russia in defiance of UN bans and notwithstanding even meaner words from Washington.

Some Russian milbloggers are speculating evil NATO told the Ukrainians when the trains loaded with foreign missiles showed up.

I guess it’s possible.

More on that here.

Two.

Oktyabrsky base, also Tver’ Oblast, about 16 kilometers from Toropets, was hit overnight Friday to Saturday.

This is another of the six major arsenal/major ammo storage sites operated by the Russian military west of the Urals.

Reportedly, this was a “secret” base not openly operated by the Kremlin.

Information is still coming in on that strike and its effect as I write this, so I don’t know how much damage, or the scale of the attack. It might have been little. But already, I am now seeing reports that one weapons system stored at this base, are reloads for Russia’s Sarmat ICBM. That would be consistent with the “secret” status of the base.

Even the possibility that Ukraine just hit Russia’s strategic nuclear deterrence capacity should be more than enough to make even the “smart people” in DC sit up and take notice.

If I were on duty, it would be an easy headline “Kyiv May Have Targeted Kremlin ICBMs.”

Assuming that they did, if I may be allowed a little editorializing – this is what America gets for dumb foreign policy.

It’s clear that the US is slow-pedaling long-range strike capacity to Ukraine because within the DC bureaucracies there is insufficient backbone to confront Russian aggression, or more exactly, it’s easier for the departments and officials and report writers and analysts to council caution and doing less not more, because of the “risk” of “nuclear escalation.” I assume the decision-makers are so fixated on upcoming elections that they can’t be bothered to think too much about Ukraine and Russia.

The present foreign policy outcome for the US, as I have stated before, is delivering an outcome almost exactly opposite the objectives of that strategy.

Absent significant US influence over Ukrainian capacity to conduct long-range strikes against Russia in a campaign to destroy Russian military capacity, the “smart people” in DC have placed themselves in a position where they have little influence on what targets inside Russia the Ukrainians might hit in the future.

Ukrainian capacity to target inside Russia is growing – no thanks to the United States. A world in which Russia’s strategic nuclear deterrent is being degraded and destroyed by Ukraine, whose attacks are on track to intensify and become more effective over time, is a world in which Russia must be more nervous and trigger-happy, and so a world closer to World War.

Most American taxpayers would prefer their government officials pursue foreign policy decreasing the chances of a nuclear exchange, not increasing it.

Three.

Overnight on Friday–Saturday, a confirmed drone strike, at least dozens and possibly more, hit an ammunition dump in Russia’s southern Krasnodar region. This is ammo base number three of the six. Some reports place incoming aircraft at one hundred, but that’s not confirmed.

What does it all mean?

This is not editorializing, but rather a step back for a moment to reflect on what the Ukrainians are managing militarily.

On Wednesday they launched an air strike against a major piece of Russian military infrastructure, with 100–150 precision-guided munitions. They got those munitions through or around whatever air defenses the Russian military thought appropriate to guard against that, and effectively wiped the ammo depot and whatever was in it off the map. It was the biggest ammo depot in European Russia and the main holding site for missiles and rockets, for the entire Russian army.

On Friday night, the Ukrainians did it again, same scale of raid, but this time they hit the Russian army’s main holding site, for all of European Russia, for artillery ammunition.

We don’t know the scale of the attack, but already it’s pretty clear they hit it hard and serious damage was done. Point being, we are eyewitnesses to the world’s first conventional war with effective strategic bombardment conducted by drone.

Thanks to the information age, another feature of modern war is clear: there is definitely more propaganda and faked information in war.

But, there also is so much data out there that sustaining lies and protecting information is a lot more difficult than in the past. It’s stunning to me how much we know about the Saturday night / Sunday morning air raid and what it probably hit.

More about Three.

First, because we have the internet and access to hundreds of local reports and comment – we know the UAVs hit a base near the town Tikhoretsk in the Krasnodar Territory.

It’s easy to find out that this site is the Russian army’s depot-level holding site for artillery shells for wars in the Caucasus and south-central Europe.

Russia is a continental power. They are far from purely European, and for some time now – even if we didn’t read the European media and think tankers, who honestly, sometimes over the past several years, haven’t seemed so interested in Russian warfighting capacity at NATO’s eastern frontier – there is all manner of strategic watch and analysis people and research groups watching the eastern end of Russia – and their buddies in North Korea.

The reporting and tracking of North Korean deliveries of shell to Russia – and this is something like 1.5 million munitions – has been an important factor in the Russian military having so much more ground firepower than the Ukrainians over the past, by people in places like South Korea and India, has been nothing less than excellent.

One of the better reports you can find, as I did in about 15 seconds of Googling, is here.

Among other things, for anyone that’s looking, there’s a hard grid of where all that North Korean ammunition got stored once it finished its rail–boat–rail–truck trip all the way from ownership by Kim Jon Un to Vladimir Putin: 45.88701587500023, 40.04341372332527.

I’ve grabbed several images showing how detailed modern content can be. It’s possible to track the probable path of the North Korean shells thousands of kilometers, all the way across Russia right to the specific ammunition depot, and then have pictures and video of Ukrainian drones blowing up there.

We need to be careful here, a little, because Krasnodar is chock–full of Russian military installations, and there is a military airfield not in the same place as the ammunition dump.

The military airfield historically is a Russian Air Force training airbase (627th Training Aviation Regiment) with L–39 Albatros aircraft, but we know, because there’s open-source imagery, that sometimes the Russian Air Force operates Su–27 fighters from the base.

There’s an ammo dump connected to the air base. Normally it would contain bombs, air-to-air missiles and the like, and some reports are saying “the ammo dump by the airfield” got hit.

However, the weight of reports and the video and social media comment show that the Ukrainian drones came in over and hit the base at above grids, west of Tikhoretsk, and north of a village called Kamenniy.

This is, the Asian experts are saying, exactly where the bulk of the North Korean ammunition sent to Moscow by Pyongyang was being stored.

There are unconfirmed reports Iranian Fath–360 missiles and/or North Korean KN–23 missiles were at the site as well, and one credible source, a military journalist, tells me that the explosions were so big and so many because the missiles were stored out in the open.

I have no idea about that, but, I’ve been reading Russian milbloggers griping literally for years that the Russian military seems to have a psychological problem with building aircraft revetments and protected ammunition storage sites. It’s almost like the Russian big brass doesn’t want to admit to themselves the Ukrainians could ever hit back.

The amount of damage that was done is still hard to say, but, even the Russian government is admitting a hundred drones flew the strike, and the local governor even admitted “fires” were causing “explosions.”

I’ve posted a screen grab from one of the individual blasts recorded at Tikhoretsk, almost certainly recorded from inside Kamenniy village, and you can decide for yourself whether that was a 50-kg warhead from a jet–propelled Palianitsiya drone, or maybe a secondary blast driven by a much heavier weight of explosives.

There’s debris, and then there’s the debris that hurts you

Which brings me to the funny part.

Ukrainians are pretty sick of being bombarded. One of the many frustrations that comes from years of being targeted by Russia is that the Ukrainians have all the access to Russian state media that they could possibly want (not least because the Russian state media spends a lot of money pushing its messaging on the Ukrainians).

This means not only are the Ukrainians bombarded and killed or injured, it’s not just that houses are blown up and millions of people get their water and electricity cut off, as it all goes on day after day, the Russian messaging comes through loud and clear to the Ukrainians. They’re human, they want to see payback.

So, for the Ukrainians, one of the most irritating features of Russian propaganda is that Ukraine can carry out a really effective attack, there can be all manner of evidence the attack was effective, video, photographs, eyewitnesses, analysts, whatever, and then the Ukrainians see and hear Russian state media reporting all the drones were shot down, and if there were ground fires it was from falling debris.

In Russia, following attack after attack, state media inevitably trots out an official, usually a governor or mayor, who repeats the mantras that everything is under control, all the drones were shot down, damage was minimal, but there perhaps was some noise or scuffles on the ground from falling Ukraine drone debris.

Here is, verbatim, my translation, but trust me the original style is more clumsy, the official Defense Ministry statement on Ukraine’s drone raids against the Russian Motherland last night:

“Over the course of the previous night, the Kyiv regime attempted a terrorist attack using drones against sites in the Russian Federation. On-duty air defense systems intercepted and destroyed 101 aircraft-type drones.”

This was followed by TASS flash reports on Tikhorestsk, quoting the Krasnodar governor Veniamin Kondratyev as stating: “Following the landing of debris from Ukrainian drones in the Tikhoretsk region of the Krasnodar district, there has begun the detonation of dangerously explosive objects.”

The Ukrainian internet’s answer to that – and have no doubt the idea is it will get punted over to the Russian internet, which the Russian government still is having a lot of trouble censoring – has been the final photo of this review: A Ukrainian drone, with the word “debris” painted in big black letters on it. In Russian.

More than 1,200 people, mostly from Kamenniy, had evacuated their homes by mid-afternoon Saturday, and fires at the ammo storage site were still burning, Russian news reports said.

No doubt civilian satellites will offer us pictures of the fires and damage in the next 48–72 hours.

The questions I have are: How many of these drones do the Ukrainians still have right now, and how fast can they manufacture more?

Reprinted from Kyiv Post's Special Military Correspondent Stefan Korshak's blog. You can find the original here. 

The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.