On Monday, Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence (HUR) announced a successful strike over the weekend on the Morozovsk military airfield in Russia’s Rostov region, about 130 km from the Ukrainian border. This attack resulted in the destruction and damage of several Su-34 fighter bombers.
However, a few months earlier, Forbes reported that Ukraine could have inflicted even more damage. At that time, numerous Su-34s were stationed at the Voronezh Malshevo air base, less than 300 km from the Ukrainian border. Unfortunately for Kyiv, the US had still restricted Ukraine from using its advanced American-made missiles to target Russian territory.
The Ukrainian military has been keenly focused on destroying Su-34 jets because these aircraft are equipped with powerful glide bombs—some weighing up to three metric tons. These bombs have the potential to devastate multiple buildings in a single strike, even if they miss their primary target.
In June, Russia had stationed dozens of Su-34s, out of an estimated total of around 100, at locations vulnerable to Western-provided weaponry. However, this opportunity for Ukraine has since closed, as Russia has redeployed these jets to more secure locations.
In July, Russian state news agency TASS released footage showing a Su-34 fighter bomber being armed with a FAB-3000 bomb, which contains 1,200 kg (2,650 lbs) of high explosive, either TNT or a TNT/RDX/Aluminum mixture. Although some military analysts have critiqued the accuracy of Russia’s glide bombs, which are fitted with the “universal planning and correction module” (UPMK), their claimed destructive radius of 230 meters (750 feet) and lethal fragments extending up to 1,200 meters (4,000 feet) make even near misses extremely dangerous.
Russia has favored glide bombs, converted from traditional “dumb bombs” like the FAB-3000, due to their low cost and the ability to launch them from Russian airspace to targets in Ukraine. As of June, it is estimated that Russian aerospace forces had conducted 3,500 glide bomb attacks, with the smaller FAB-250 and FAB-500 kg (550 and 1,100 lbs) bombs being the most frequently used