RUSSIA’S OLD BOMBS ELUDE UKRAINE’S DEFENCES
Warplanes dropping Soviet-era bombs which are hard to shoot down.
Maryna Ivanova, a young woman living in a riverside village in southern Ukraine, had an uneasy feeling when her fiance and brother left for work one morning in early May. They were headed to a nearby island in the Dnieper River, the watery front line between Russian and Ukrainian forces, and the area was getting heavily shelled.
Standing at her stove, making pork and potato soup, Ms Ivanova heard — and felt — an enormous blast, much more frightening, she said, than the explosions that have become routine. “It felt like something was dropped right on us,” she said.
A few minutes later, she heard shouting outside and ran down to the dock. A boat pulled up. Inside lay her brother, soaked in blood. Slumped next to him was her fiance with part of his face blown off. Both were dead.
She fell to her knees. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” she said.
The strike was not a mortar, a tank round or a projectile fired by long-range artillery, according to Ukrainian officials who investigated the incident. It was, they said, an 500kg modified bomb dropped from a distant Russian warplane, the latest destructive twist in a war that is intensifying.
As Kyiv gears up for a much-anticipated counteroffensive, sources say the Russians are increasing their use of Soviet-era bombs.
Although they have limitations, the weapons, they said, are proving harder to shoot down than the fastest, most modern missiles that the Ukrainians have become adept at intercepting.
Much of this war is being fought with longrange munitions, from artillery shells to ballistic missiles. In the past few weeks, the Russians have launched wave after wave of missiles and exploding drones at Ukrainian cities, and Ukraine has shot down just about all of them.
But the aircraft bombs are different. They don’t have propulsion systems like cruise missiles or stay in the air nearly as long as drones. The bombs are aloft for only 70 seconds or less and are much more difficult for Ukraine’s air defenses to track. They are little dots on radar screens that soon disappear after being dropped, Ukrainian officials said, and then they slam into villages.
“This is the evolution of the air war,” said Lt Col Denys Smazhnyi of the Ukrainian air force. “They first tried cruise missiles, and we shot them down. Then they tried drones, and we shot those down. They are constantly looking for a solution to strike us, and we are looking for one to intercept them.
“It’s evolution, countermeasures, evolution, countermeasures,” Lt Col Smazhnyi added. “It’s a nonstop process, unfortunately.”
The Russians have retrofitted some of the bombs with satellite navigation systems and wings that stretch their range, turning an old-fashioned weapon, which Moscow has thousands of, into a more modern glide bomb.
Russian military bloggers have boasted about the prowess of the glide bombs, posting videos and comments starting in early January. One Russian analyst provided detailed information on Russia’s development of them going back to the early 2000s and said their use was “a step in the right direction.”
Ukrainian officials are using the threat of these bombs to help press their case for F-16s, which allies are expected to provide after the Biden administration reversed course and allowed Ukrainian pilots to be trained. The Ukrainians say that they are outmatched in the skies and that F-16s could chase away Russian warplanes bombing their communities.
Few places have been as heavily hit by glide bombs as the area around Kherson, an industrial city along the Dnieper River in southern Ukraine, Ukrainian officials said.
As Ukraine’s expected counteroffensive looms, Ukrainian troops are pouring into Kherson and nearby villages like Veletenske, where Ms Ivanova lived with her fiance, Kostiantyn Rumega.
He was 19, she is 20. He was looking for work, and on the morning of May 2, a man who ran a fishing business summoned him to a nearby river island to clean some nets.
His fiancee said that he didn’t want to go, because he had already been in trouble once for not having the necessary fishing permits, and it was dangerous — the Russians have been lighting up that entire area with an arsenal of weapons. But he needed the money, Ms Ivanova said, and before leaving, he lingered at the door.
“At that moment when he was kissing me and saying goodbye, there was so much love,” she said.
“I never experienced it before. It felt different.” It was as if he knew, she said.