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Images published on the Internet of the Tupolev Tu22M allegedly attacked by drones at the Soltsy2 airfield
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Airports, train stations, naval bases, broadcast antennas, fuel depots and commercial areas.
Drone attacks in Russia and Moscowcontrolled areas intensified in 2023 to over 160 in one year. Some, like those recorded on Wednesday (August 30) that hit an airport in the Russian city of Pskov, were more than 600 km from the border with Ukraine.
While Kiev rarely comments on attacks on Russian territory, Ukraine is believed to have increased the use of explosive drones to bomb Russia in recent weeks as part of its counteroffensive strategy, hurting Moscow’s ability to resupply its troops becomes.
Ukrainian military intelligence claimed responsibility for the drone attack on the Russian base in Pskov that took place on Wednesday.
In a war where aviation is not as relevant as in other conflicts, drones have become a fundamental tool of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
They played a prominent role at the beginning of the conflict, for example when they managed to stop the 40 km long convoy on the way to Kiev. And its effects are increasingly being felt on Russian territory.
“Drones are extremely important for Ukraine,” political scientist Sergei Sumlenny, an expert on Eastern Europe and founder of the European Center for Resilience Initiative (Eric), tells BBC Mundo (the BBC’s Spanishlanguage service).
In the latest wave of attacks, two military cargo planes, a fuel depot and a microelectronics factory were attacked by drones in different parts of Russia.
Last week, two suspected drone strikes hit Moscow’s main business district, hitting a skyscraper under construction and the Expo Center exhibition complex a few days earlier. Around the same time, three people were killed in a suspected drone attack in the border region of Belgorod and five others were injured in the attack on a train station in the Kursk region a few days earlier, according to Russian authorities.
The latest target of the drones was also one of the best aircraft in Russian aviation, the Tupolev Tu22M supersonic bomber. One of these planes, capable of flying at twice the speed of sound, was shot down last week at an air base south of St. Petersburg, according to images confirmed by the BBC.
Credit, ANTON GERASHCHENKO
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Image of the device that crashed about 100 km from Moscow and appears to be a Ukrainianmade UJ22 drone
Of the more than 160 attacks detected in Russia and Moscowcontrolled areas, most were also concentrated in the Bryansk and Belgorod regions, near the western border with Ukraine, according to Russian media reports monitored by BBC Verify Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014.
A dozen maritime drone strikes were also recorded against Russian targets in the Black Sea, including naval bases and the Crimean Bridge.
The peninsula experienced the largest attack by unmanned aircraft on August 25, when a total of 42 drones struck a military base in the area.
The Moscow region, which is around 450 km from the border with Ukraine, also became a target for drones.
One of them, which arrived about 100 km from the capital, looked like a Ukrainianmade UJ22, which has a range of 800 km in autonomous flight.
As of the publication of this report, Kiev has not claimed responsibility for these attacks. However, President Volodymyr Zelensky has repeatedly stated that attacks on Russian territory are an “inevitable, natural and absolutely fair process.”
What are the goals of these drones?
According to analysts consulted by BBC Mundo, reaching Russian soil has a double objective.
“On the one hand, these attacks remind the Russian population that the war is not something that is happening far away and has nothing to do with them,” explains Ulrike Franke from the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR).
This particularly applies to attacks in and around Moscow, adds Franke. For example, in May, two drones managed to reach the Kremlin and, although they did not cause major material damage, they managed to shatter the image of security and invincibility projected by the Russian government.
Somehow, “the message these drones are sending is: war is here, your capital is not safe and Putin is weak,” Sumlenny adds.
But in addition to the psychological impact that these attacks have, there is also a disruptive component to this strategy.
“For example, there are also efforts to paralyze Russian air traffic, which is completely centralized in Moscow, and to slow down decisionmaking, which happens, for example, when the government district of the capital is attacked and employees have to leave.” “Your offices. Offices,” says the expert.
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Drones managed to reach Moscow’s financial district
For example, on July 4th, flights from Moscow’s Vnukovo airport had to be diverted after a drone attack. Weeks later, the airport had to be closed for a few days due to new attacks.
The aim of these unmanned aircraft was also to target oil and energy infrastructure facilities.
The BBC managed to identify at least nine drone attacks on oil reserves. One of them was in Sevastopol, the most populous city on the Crimean Peninsula, which was attacked on April 29, destroying several of its fuel tanks.
A month later, an oil refinery was set on fire in the Krasnodar region of southern Russia, about 200 km from the border with Crimea. The regional governor said the damage was likely caused by a drone.
Layla Guest, an analyst at security consultancy Sibylline, says that “it is very likely that Ukrainian forces will prioritize attacks on oil refineries, as well as Russian railway infrastructure and logistics in general, in order to cause maximum disruption,” the BBC highlighted. Check.
But drones also have military goals.
A drone attack on a military training camp in the Voronezh region on May 10 injured at least ten Russian soldiers, and in December 2022 another attack hit an air base 600 km northeast of the border with Ukraine, claiming three lives in the Russian army.
What types of drones are used?
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In the latest wave of attacks, drones managed to reach Pskov airfield, about 600 km from the border with Ukraine.
Since the beginning of the war, Ukraine has used several drone systems for different purposes, from surveillance and terrain reconnaissance, as is the case with commercial drones, to combating specific targets, with kamikaze drones.
Some look like children’s toys, others are huge military aircraft that can reach a wingspan of 15 meters.
One of the most successful for the Ukrainian armed forces was the Turkishmade Bayraktar TB2, which, according to Franke, had great importance at the beginning of the war.
“Ukraine made heavy use of multiple drones, and the Bayraktar TB2 proved to be the real star of the air war for Ukraine, inflicting heavy casualties on Russian forces, some of which were recorded and posted on social media,” says David Cenciotti, editor from the BBC Verify Aviationist blog.
But Ukraine has also expanded its local production of drones, some with very innovative systems.
“The Ukrainian drone industry is quite impressive. “It has been developing and manufacturing drones itself over the last year and a half, and the systems used to attack Russia most likely come from Ukraine,” said Ulrike Franke.
Recently, the Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine Mijailo Fedórov announced a Ukrainian drone, the socalled R18, which, according to him, “can fly from Kiev to Moscow and vice versa.”
Another Ukrainian creation, whose production began in 2022, is the drone “Bober” (“Beaver” in Ukrainian) with a range of around a thousand kilometers, according to the Kyiv Post.
This drone model appears to be responsible for the early August attack on Moscow’s financial district, which hit the Russian Ministry of Economy building.
This staterun production is supported by an army of experts who came together after the 2014 invasion of Crimea and began developing their own models.
A good example is socalled First Person View (FPV, Remote Vision Piloting), which are manufactured in Ukraine and used as kamikaze drones.
“They are incredibly cheap, can be made for less than $500) and can carry between 1kg and 1.5kg of explosives that can be used as small munitions.” They fly directly into a building or moving vehicle and can attack any unarmoured Destroy targets, such as infantry, trucks or Russian antennas,” explains Sergei Sumlenny.
According to the analyst, FPV drones are “practically like smart ammunition, but cost 1% of the price of highprecision artillery shells.”
These specialist groups receive money to buy electronic components from digital stores like Ebay or Amazon, says Sumlenny, and produce the remaining parts using 3D printers to then donate the drones to the army. Its operators use virtual reality glasses to send them to the desired destination.
From where are attacks against Russia carried out?
So far, Kiev has not confirmed that the attacks against Russia or Moscowcontrolled areas were carried out by its army or that the drones came from Ukrainian soil.
“Although Ukraine has not confirmed that its forces were responsible for the attacks [contra Moscou]“I believe that the preemptive attacks we saw in 2022 prove that Ukraine is capable of launching longrange attacks of this type from Ukrainian territory,” Cenciotti said.
As for range, experts say drones launched from Ukraine could penetrate deep into Russian territory and reach as far as Moscow, which is about 450 km from the border.
But experts disagree as to whether the attacks were carried out from Ukraine or on Russian territory.
For Sergei Sumlenny, many of these attacks, especially those in the Moscow region or on the banks of the Ukrainian border, “were launched from Russian territory by Ukrainians or special forces of the Ukrainian army.”
The founder of Eric claims that the technical difficulties of balancing weights and explosives, as well as the fuel needed to reach long distances, make it less likely that the drones have left Ukraine.
Drone expert Steve Wright from the University of the West of England believes a drone launched from Ukraine could have implications for the Kremlin. However, “my opinion is that the drone was fired from a much closer range and therefore it would not have had to hit a large part of Moscow’s defenses,” he tells BBC Verify.
According to Ulrike Franke, Ukrainian drones are technically capable of reaching very distant targets. Therefore, the most plausible explanation for this is that they were launched from Ukraine.
“Nothing led us to believe that Ukraine has significant military forces in Russia capable of launching drone strikes from Russian territory for days without anyone noticing,” the researcher adds.
*With reporting from BBC Mundo’s Paula Rosas and BBC Verify’s Jake Horton, Olga Robinson and Daniele Palumbo.