August 24 — Day 913 — Happy Independence Day, Five Big Strikes Almost All Drones, Some Predictions
Hi all!
First off, Happy Ukrainian Independence Day to those who are celebrating.
From my point of view as an American it’s quite educational to be in a country actually fighting for it’s independence, on an independence day itself.
Quick conclusion: Based on what I’ve seen here, I doubt very much all those Continentals and Founding Fathers were as agreeable, organized and sure of their eventual victory, on July 4 1777–1781 inclusive, as we Americans somehow remember them. In fact, in a war of independence, I find, people argue all the time, they don’t know the right way to go forward, you can see inefficiency and sloth wherever you look, most people seem selfish, and it’s screamingly obvious that the burden of a war of independence is not equally shared. But everyone knows they’ll win eventually.
Moving on to today’s topic, I know I hinted that I would take on probable Ukrainian strategic goals in the Kursk battles, and from where I sit it really looks like there is an honest-to-Manstein classic envelopment and encirclement operation, by the Ukrainians against the Russians, in progress up there even as I write this.
But also and less covered in detail by the mainstream, the last ten days have seen the Russians take a proper hammering from Ukrainian long-range strikes, almost all of it by attack drones. These attacks have been of a scale and degree of success unprecedented in this war.
I say again: Unprecedented. The nature of warfare is changing before our eyes, we are eyewitnesses to the world’s first conventional war strategic bombardment campaign almost totally by drone.
Why do I say that? Well, let’s look at what the Ukrainians have blown up deep in Russia-controlled territory recently, shall we?
Strike One: Savasleyka airfield (a/k/a Borisoglebsk airfield) Voronezh region
On April 13 Ukrainian long range drones hit Savasleyka air base in Russia’s Voronezh region. It seems like there were less than a dozen. Based on distance, it may have been Lyuti or Bobr drones.
Russian official sources said damage was minimal and all the drones were shot down. The Ukrainians said the target was air defenses.
Strike Two: Savasleyka military air base, Russia’s Nizhniy Novogord region, second time
On August 16 more Ukrainian drones appeared during the early morning hours and started glide paths towards Savasleyka’s aircraft and base facilities. This time there appear to have been well as many as two dozen.
It’s worth noting the Ukrainian kamikaze planes flew close to 750 km., and since there were air defense at least around Moscow and the air base itself, they probably flew a good deal further, maybe even 20 percent. As we have seen, even if they had thought before the Ukrainians could never hit a base that far east, the Russians had 72 hours to get ready for the Aug. 16 strike.
The base appears to have been defended by soldiers with personal weapons, which are most useful during a drone attack for making loud noise which helps defenders feel braver, and at least one of Pantsyr close air-defense systems designed, specifically, to detect and destroy incoming drones.
One might speculate about what air defenses were there, that got hit on Aug. 13, but that of course would be speculation.
The Russian Ministry of Defense said damage was minimal and all from falling debris. However, locals reported explosions sounding just like bombs or missile cooking off taking place, for the next twelve hours, and all manner of smoke and noise coming from the direction of the air base, and also ambulances driving at speed to and from.
The Ukrainians, meanwhile, said no, it was a pretty durn effective strike, and that by their calculation on Aug. 13 there were 11 MiG-31K/I fighters, two Il-76 cargo planes and five Mi-8 and Mi-24 helicopters at the airfield at the time of the attack on August 13.
The MiG-31K and its pilots are widely hated in Ukraine because the plane can carry an inaccurate but high-velocity, long-range missile — more or less an upgraded V-2 tied to the bottom of the jet — meaning every time a MiG-31 takes off all of Ukraine has to suffer irritating air raid warnings. the drones put out of action one way or another one fighter, a pair of four-engine cargo jets, and damaged another five planes, all fighters.
The Russian internet showed ground video of a pretty serious explosion by an Il-76 and several ground blasts elsewhere. The Ukrainians later said they thought they destroyed one MiG-31, two Il-76es and damaged another five MiG-31es to various degrees. Ammo depots at the base definitely got hit and some of the bombs exploding at the airfield were certainly supposed to have been dropped on Ukraine, they said.
Strike 3: Proletarsk fuel storage base, 150 km. East of Rostov — most likely a couple of dozen Bobr drones
On August 19 about a dozen Ukrainian medium-range drones, so I assume it was those fat Bobr tail-prop aircraft, came in low and on course for a tank farm/fuel storage site containing 78 of those big flat cylindrical-shaped petroleum products reservoirs, you know, the kind that blow up impressively when Godzilla stomps on them. The facility is operated by the Russian state as part of the national strategic fuel reserve. Inside the fuel tanks, variously, there was diesel, gasoline, lubricant oil, crude, aviation fuel, among others. This is all about 400 km from the closest reasonable Ukrainian launch sites.
This strike flew or more exactly threaded its way through one of the worlds densest air networks on earth, including whatever the Russians have deployed around Donetsk, Rostov, east Crimea and the Azov Sea, and started blowing up in the vicinity of the tank farm. Russian official sources claimed about a dozen drones were shot down and admitted that, maybe, falling debris from one or two of the drones might have caused a little damage on a “government facility”.
Meanwhile in the real world, based on an absolute blizzard of Russian social media panic messages, all manner of angry Russian mil-bloggers, Ukrainian official statements, Russia’s Ministry of Emergency Situations and later on NASA and ESA satellite images, what appeared to have happened was something like six to eight of the reservoirs were hit and blown up.
The fire was so bad that that they brought in trucks and crews from as far away as Rostov, and still they couldn’t put it out. For days from time to time there would be a big blast and video would appear of another reservoir had gotten torched.
A full week later, the fire was expanding, houses and fields adjacent to the facility had caught fire, and if you believe local sources on Friday two of the reservoirs with jet fuel had just gone balooey. In one of the econ info platforms I read that the site contains something like half the fuel reserves available for Crimea, worth on any given day about $200 million. By Thursday the smoke cloud was 50 km. and visible from space.
By this point Russian officials declaring the situation to be “under control” was becoming so funny even state propaganda platforms were complaining that pretending won’t put out a fire.
On Friday Aug. 23 the Ukrainians sent more drones to the tank farm and there were more explosions. During that attack, again at night, all the Russians managed on site was small arms fire.
A snapshot article with more details about that is here. The probable total cost of all the drones, most likely, was without doubt less than the price of a single US ATACMS missile, or similar.
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/37868
Strike 4: Millerovo airfield in Russia’s Rostov region — Murgin 5 drones mostly — About 20–30 of them
On August 21 about two dozen Murgin 5 drones attacked the major Millerevo airfield in the south-west Russia, according to the Ukrainians taking out an S-300 long-range air defense system covering maybe 150 km. of air space in south Russia and reaching, possibly, to the east end of the Sea of Azov. Official sources said everything was shot down, the local internet and the Ukrainian army general staff said no, there were ground explosions, big fires, ambulances going in and out, and so on.
The Napoleons of you will probably already have realized, a reduction of high-capacity Russian air defenses might generate downstream consequences somewhere nearby. You know, if the Ukrainians were clever. Twenty plus drones is a lot.
Strike 5: Marinovka airfield, sort of near Volgograd and really near Kalach-Na-Donu, gets hammered.
On August 22, so one day after the emphatic strike against Millerevo and the S-300 system, and on a direct east-bound flight path over Millerovo airfield deeper into Russia, a wave of Ukrainian drones homed in on Marinovka airfield.
History buffs may well remember Kalach-Na-Donu, the nearest substantial city, was where Red Army forces completed their Stalingrad encirclement of 6th Army in November 1942. But I digress.
Parked on Marinovka airfield, by confirmed accounts, appear to have been at least a dozen late-model Su-34 strike jets, and another dozen Su-24 supersonic bombers. This is the primary base from which the Russian air force flies glider bomb strikes against Ukrainian forces in Donbas. A blow-by-blow I wrote several hours after the attack is here:
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/37804
As always the Russian Defense Ministry said all drones were shot down and damage from falling debris was negligible.
The internet, meanwhile, once it got its hands on open source satellite images and some really excellent post-strike photographs taken from the ground, either by a Russian social media user with zero sense of operational security or a Ukrainian intelligence operative pretending to be a Russian social media user — that most likely by the time the Ukrainians were finished with Marinovka airfield pretty much everything that couldn’t be flown away was now a write off.
General opinion by the weekend was that the Russian Air Force lost 1 x Su-34 and 1x Su-24 completely trashed, and at least 1 x Su-34 and 2 x Su-24 badly damaged and certainly unflyable for a long time, if ever. This is pretty hard to argue with because of a mass of ground and overhead data made public by a “Osint researcher” named MT Anderson, who seems to have incredible access to absolutely-confirmable imagery of things hit by Ukrainian forces deep behind Russian lines.
The Russian mil-blogger Fighterbomber later complained those planes all were on the ground, because they were broken and the Russian Air Force can’t get spare parts to them.
The point I would make is, it’s close to 100 percent the Marinovka airfield strike and all the burnt Russian aircraft were the direct result of an attack against a critical air defense system, at Millerovo, the day before.
Strike 6: Port Kavkaz by Kerch Strait — Russia’s last ferry to Crimea gets sunk — A pair of Storm Shadow missiles
On August 23 a Ukrainian strike jet or jests, according to most accounts Su-27 fighter aircraft modified to launch ground attack missiles, dropped a pair of Storm Shadow missiles in relatively safe air space over the Zaporizhzhia region, after which the NATO-standard weapons set course across a chunk of the Black Sea, apparently overflew the Crimea peninsula entirely, and homed in on a place called Port Kavkaz, which is the Russia mainland loading/drop off point for ferries moving between Russia and Crimea.
This is, probably, the best-defended air space in all of Russia, quite possibly including Moscow and places where Putin lives and works.
At least one missile plowed into a 4,000 ton ferry called the Konro Trader. By luck or clever Ukrainian planning, there were thirty rail tanker cars on the Konro Trader. All reportedly were filled with fuel for Crimea.
At least one of the missiles — either British Storm Shadows or the French version called SCALP — appears to have worked exactly as advertised and punched into the ferry and blew up inside. About two-thirds of the fuel cars blew up or burned, and the rest were lost because the ferry sank at its moorings.
Yes, there were giant car queues/lines in Crimea at filling stations within hours, automobile fuel prices in the peninsula spiked about three percent overnight, and the official Russian response to shortages of some grades of gasoline was to ban filling stations from putting up signs that they are out of a certain octane, but allowing them to sell a different octane as the deficit fuel, obviously at a windfall profit. This is all over the Crimean internet and take it from me motorists are angry.
But the real problem for the Russians is that the Kono Trader was a pretty critical piece of maritime logistics capacity for the Russians because it was the last working ferry available to Moscow, in the Black Sea, capable of taking rolled rail cars aboard.
Post Aug 23, of all the bad options, the least bad for the Russians for moving fuel into Crimea at scale is to find a river-capable rail ferry somewhere in Russia, getting it to Port Kavkaz, and risking it at sea. River ferries sink in sea storms and the Kerch Strait gets storms. So there’s that.
An alternative is collecting fuel semi trucks from all over Russia and sort of attempting a Berlin Blockade-type operation of massed fuel deliveries by truck. The problems there are first Russia is under sanctions so if it shifts fuel trucks to supplying Crimea from somewhere else in Russia then that’s lost capacity and angry motorists there. Second, the roads into Crimea are either via the Perekop Isthmus which crosses via three causeway/bridges already under periodic Ukrainian HIMARS fires, or, via the Kerch Bridge, which if ever you wanted an example of a thin logistical thread that could break at any moment, there you go.
And of course sending rail cars across the Kerch Bridge, according to Ukrainian intelligence anyway, is a big risk for the Russians because the 2022 truck bomb attack on the rail line weakened the cross-water supports for that link to make it dangerous to send fully-loaded trains across.
My point here is that the the logistical mess that Crimea now constitutes for the Kremlin just got a lot worse, it doesn’t look like it will be fixed any time soon, and that the present situation is the direct outcome of a Ukrainian strategic bombardment campaign against Russia that is now accelerating.
IMPLICATIONS AND WHAT’S NEXT?
- These were the big, multi-aircraft strikes. There were onsies and twosies about every other night to multiple locations in Russia. If you are a Russian air space defender these days, either you are on shift work or you aren’t getting sleep.
- Probably we will see a lull in the strikes because the Ukrainians have to manufacture more drones with range to hit deep into Russia, in no small part because Ukraine’s western allies — the Americans mostly — aren’t comfortable with giving Ukrainian missiles able to do the same thing.
- Due to this lull, the Russians will shift aircraft and support equipment deeper in country, which will reduce Russian air strike capacity, along with Ukrainian capacity to hit Russian airfields. So this nice little streak of successes probably won’t go on in the way it is right now, for too much longer.
- That being said, the Ukrainians have demonstrated a clear capacity to hit critical targets deep inside Russian territory and even with limited drone counts that capacity is obviously increasing. Even Ukrainian pessimists (and take it from me, you have to be pretty negative to stand out as a pessimist in Slavic Ukraine) can see that over time Ukraine is going to manufacture more not less strike drones. In the longer term, it’s hard to see how any fixed Russian military infrastructure this side of the Urals (almost) can stay safe.
- So far, the Ukrainians are far ahead of the Russians in the continuing battles where the Russians are constantly trying to deploy air defense systems covering their air space and the Ukrainians are constantly trying to find critical nodes in that network to blow up and create a gap.
- This is a direct, I say again direct outcome of NATO elint data collection flights flown about every second day mostly by British Rivet Joint aircraft out of Mildenhall. This is probably also thanks to data collected by US Global Hawks flying the length of the Black Sea about once or twice a week
- On Thursday Aug 22, right before the Port Kavkaz strike and right after the Marinkovka airfield strike , NATO chose to push an E-3 Sentry AWACS plane into air space above Romania, giving whomever that aircraft was passing data to real time information of everything flying for hundreds of kilometers to the east.
It might be a coincidence, but in any case, I haven’t seen an E-3 mission in east NATO coincide effectively with a Ukrainian Storm Shadow strike against west Russia.
Moscow says such data is passed routinely to the Ukrainians. As the Ukrainians accelerate their campaign of strikes deep into Russia, it’s going to get harder and harder for the West and Russia to pretend NATO isn’t helping Ukraine blow stuff up and kill people inside Russia.
So those smart people in Washington that think they’re brilliant strategists because they worry about red lines with Russia, my guess, they’re going to worry some more.
Really concise and informative summary. Thanks!
Thanks for the summary, this is something that can help people here in Norway to understand the strategic air war going on. I have read about most of this before since I try to follow closely, but this was a clear concise summary. Like the last. Thank you for this work. I guess I need to follow the K Post.