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- Ukraine said it struck a military airfield in Russia overnight, marking the latest deep strike.
- On Wednesday, Ukrainian forces attacked an ammunition depot and a drone storage facility.
- Kyiv continues to find success with its long-range targeting inside Russia.
Ukrainian forces struck an ammunition depot at a military airfield in Russia overnight, the latest in a string of long-range attacks targeting Moscow’s war machine.
In the past two days, the Ukrainian military has said it caused damage at a key Russian ammunition depot, a drone storage facility, and now another ammo depot at an airfield.
The back-to-back-to-back strikes underscore Ukraine’s reach and demonstrate the repeated inability of Russia’s air defenses to protect its military installations, including during the most recent attack.
The Ukrainian military said on Thursday that in the latest strike into Russia during the previous night, it attacked Khanskaya airfield, located in the southwestern Republic of Adygea. Ukraine said that it struck an ammunition warehouse at the site and caused “fire damage” to the airfield, which hosted Su-34 and Su-27 warplanes. It’s unclear if the attack impacted any aircraft.
Russia’s Su-34 fighter-bombers have been particularly problematic for Kyiv because these aircraft can release highly destructive glide bombs to devastating effect.
Glide bombs, stand-off weapons, are notoriously difficult to intercept. Ukraine can really only defeat this threat by targeting the munitions and the warplanes at their bases, which Kyiv has done on multiple occasions over the past few months. It’s unclear if the latest ammunition depot stored these weapons.
The attack in Khanskaya came on the heels of two other Ukrainian strikes deep into Russian territory.
On Wednesday, Ukraine said it used drones to strike an ammunition depot in Russia’s Bryansk region where glide bombs, missiles, and artillery shells were stored — including weaponry from North Korea and Iran.
Ukraine has targeted several Russian ammunition depots since mid-September. Kyiv has relied on domestically produced long-range drones for these operations because it is not permitted to use its inventory of Western-provided cruise and ballistic missiles to strike inside Russia.
Hours after the Bryansk operation, Ukraine said it destroyed a base in Russia’s Krasnodar region that hosted around 400 Shahed-136 one-way attack drones. Some open-source intelligence accounts speculated that Kyiv carried out the attack using its homemade R-360 Neptune cruise missiles, anti-ship weapons that were modified for land attack.
Western officials, the Ukrainian armed forces, and war analysts have said that Kyiv’s deep-strike campaign is likely to complicate Russian operations inside Ukraine.
“As far as long-range strikes, we’ve seen some successful one-way attack drone strikes by the Ukrainians against ammo storage points in Russia,” a senior US military official told reporters Wednesday. “We’ve also seen some strikes against fuel facilities in Crimea. We do think that those will have some impact on the battlefield.”
The official said the effects aren’t immediate and explained that it takes time for them to be seen on the battlefield.
Conflict analysts at the Institute for the Study of War think tank said continued Ukrainian strikes against military facilities in Russia would place more operational pressure on Moscow’s forces.
This development will compel “the Russian military command to reorganize and disperse support and logistics systems within Russia to mitigate the impact of such strikes,” the analysts wrote in a Wednesday assessment.
