Russia launched a reinvasion of Kharkiv oblast in mid-May, rapidly pushing across the Ukraine border and threatening to advance on Kharkiv city. After pushing for about 6 kilometers, advancing Russian forces ran into stiff opposition from Ukrainian defenses and their initial sprint slowed to a crawl. Two weeks later, President Joe Biden gave Ukraine permission to use U.S.-made weapons on targets just across the border in the Belgorod area of Russia, and that seemed to genuinely turn the tide.
Ukraine has halted Russia’s advance across this revived front and regained territory in several towns or villages, including the critical crossroads town of Vovchansk.
But even as Russia ran up another hideous tally of lost men and machines, a new tactic has become more dominant. Russia may be in short supply of sophisticated missiles and its ships may have been essentially eliminated from the Black Sea, but it has a seemingly unending supply of glide bombs. Now it’s using those bombs to absolutely pulverize any Ukrainian village, town, or city it can reach from airfields inside Russia.
As NPR reports, glide bombs are striking one after another in the Kharkiv region. Carrying up to 6,600 pounds of high explosives, the bombs can devastate an entire city block. Russia used 3,200 glide bombs in May—and the pace only seems to be increasing.
Fighters on the ground in Kharkiv report that Russia has steeply reduced the number of tanks and armored vehicles it is using. Instead, lightly supported infantry groups are moving with glide bombs clearing their way.
Not only are these glide bombs hitting positions near the front line, they’re being used in Kharkiv and other cities away from the immediate action. The glide bombs can reach much farther into Ukrainian territory than Russian artillery or MLRS.
This isn’t only happening in Kharkiv. It’s happening everywhere.
Russia’s deployment of heavy artillery as a means of clearing possible defensive positions while its infantry engaged in wave assaults has been read as a “scorched earth tactic” since the illegal invasion began. But that term is being revived in connection with glide bombs as Russia rolls out hundreds of massive explosives each day along the front. They’re being used like artillery, but the results are larger and more immediate. In a matter of days, glide bombs have reduced Vovchansk to the kind of rubble that resulted from weeks of fighting in Bakhmut, Severodonetsk, or other cities on the eastern border.
Glide bombs eliminated the last Ukrainian positions in Avdiivka. They’re also flattening buildings around the town of Chasiv Yar, southwest of Bakhmut, where Russian forces have been trying to capture a position of high ground from resilient Ukrainian troops under almost constant attack for weeks.
The increasing use of these bombs and their increasing importance to Russian military tactics means Ukraine’s ability to reach across the border and stop these bombs before they are launched will be the make-or-break feature of the next few months.
Now, Russia is putting the finishing touches on yet another airstrip less than 60 miles (100 kilometers) from Ukraine and launching the bombs routinely from multiple bases just inside Russian borders, according to the AP analysis of satellite pictures and photos from a Russian aviation Telegram channel.
If it seems like a lot of Ukraine’s drone activity in the past few weeks has been centered on targeting Russian airbases, this is why. Ukrainian forces may have held tight against a sudden Russian reinvasion across the northern border, defenders may be digging deep at Chasiv Yar, and Ukraine may be putting the brakes on Russian advances along the road west of Novooleksandrivka, but they can’t do this under a constant rain of enormous bombs.
The glide bombs aren’t sophisticated, modern, or even very accurate, and they don’t need to be. They’re just big. And they seem to be the one Russian weapon that can’t be stopped by very clever Ukrainian operators flying FPV drones.
Ukraine has to have the ability to outrange these bombs; to stop the planes that are lofting them before they take off; or to take the planes down before the bombs can be released. Part of what they have needed is simple permission. And now they have it.
The U.S. has told Ukraine it can use American-supplied weapons to hit any Russian forces attacking from across the border — not just those in the region near Kharkiv, according to U.S. officials.
That’s fantastic. Now would be a great time for a few F-16s to put in an appearance.
Author and editor Michael Weiss spoke with a group of aviation experts to explain a mystery: Why does Russia keep bombing itself with glide bombs? What he learned was that the conversion of dumb bomb to smart bomb is far from perfect.
Unfortunately, Russia does not have the kind of leaders that are going to stop just because they dropped a few dozen bombs on their own civilian population.
Let’s hope this is true. Because South Korean equipment for Ukraine would be much better than the North Korean material Russia is getting.
