A Russian glider bomb campaign touted by Moscow as a relentless bombardment of precision-guided weaponry against hapless Ukrainian troops unable to defend themselves just passed the embarrassing milestone of one hundred “abnormal munitions releases” over Russian territory, according to independent news platforms.
As of Tuesday, June 18, the number of these air-launched munitions, which normally weigh between 500 and 1500 kilograms (1100 and 3300 pounds) that Russian Air Force pilots have aimed at Ukrainian targets but have fallen on Russia’s western Belgorod Region, had climbed to 103 bombs in just the past four months, the Astra news agency reported.
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Almost all the wayward weapons have been conventional FAB high explosive aerial bombs fitted with what Russia calls the “unified gliding and correction module (UMPC)” an after-market guidance and range extension kit, first fielded in quantity by Russia in early 2024. By May, according to official Ukrainian statistics Russian aircraft have been dropping on average 50-100 of these guided bombs every day, occasionally peaking at 150.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a June 14 statement that “Russia uses 3,200-3,500 KABs (Ukrainian for Corrected Aerial Bomb) every month exclusively against [Ukrainian] civilians and civilian infrastructure. He suggested this was so people would be forced from their homes and the Russian Federation free to occupy them, which he said was “just like Hitler did – ‘carpet bombing’ - everything is the same, it’s the exact same textbook.”
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According to most sources, a small but significant percentage of the munitions Russian pilots intend to drop on Ukrainian targets fail to function as designed.
A June 17 unintended release of a Russian bomb struck near a residential building in the village of Krapivnoe, on the outskirts of the town of Shebekino. No one was hurt. Local emergency response teams reported finding another unexploded bomb, likely dropped on the same day, near the village of Dobroe. On June 18, local security troops found an intact Russian glider bomb on the outskirts of the village of Tseplyaevo-Vtoroe, a good 25 kilometers north of the Ukrainian border, according to local media reports.
The deadliest accidental Russian bomb drop in recent weeks hit a five floor residential property at Zheleznodorozhnaya Street 18A, in Shebekino. Five residents died in the blast, Russian emergency responders reported, with two more dying in hospital, and six others reportedly injured.
Russian state-controlled media, among them the pro-Kremlin blogger Simon Pegov, blamed Ukrainian air forces for the bombing.
Independent analysts questioned that claim, citing the Ukrainian Air Force’s near-total absence from air space close to the Russian border compared with thousands of Russian bomber sorties over the Belgorod region in the past four months. A Monday statement by Ukraine’s Joint Forces headquarters said that Shebekino is commonly used by Russian pilots as a convenient release point for glider bomb drops targeting Ukraine to the southwest.
Kyiv Post reviewed video and photo materials geo-located to the site of the Shebekino strike and concluded a weapon traveling on a northeast to southwest axis most likely penetrated the apartment building’s roof and detonated with devastating effect. The evidence pointed strongly to an air-dropped bomb weighing at least 250 kilograms that was dropped by an aircraft flying towards Ukraine.
The Astra report cited OSINT researcher Ruslan Leviev suggesting the Russian Air Force bombed a Russian apartment building because of the failure of a poorly designed and mass-produced guidance mechanism inside the glider bomb kit.
“(Y)ou need to understand that, unlike Western ‘high precision’ devices, UMPCs are made in large quantities using civilian electronics whose reliability requirements are lower… this can periodically lead to serious incidents and casualties. For example, hits on an apartment building in the Belgorod region, and the collapse of an apartment building section in Belgorod itself. In our opinion, a strike by a misfunctioning glider bomb due to an error by the UMPC is the most likely cause of the tragedy,” Leviev said.
Ukrainian military tech expert Serhiy Flesh, a writer specializing in the development of equipment and weapons by field operators, said in a June 18 article that the Soviet-designed fuses aboard Russian glider bombs are likely responsible for many unexploded weapons, because the fuse was engineered to detonate the bomb after a vertical impact on the target, while the new glider bomb kits cause the munitions to fly in more horizontal trajectories.
Citing research by Ukrainian bomb disposal experts, Flesh, said Russian engineers probably installed a secondary fuse tied to the UMPC module in the glider bomb kit, which, if it functions as designed, arms the bomb’s detonator and as a backup triggers an explosion based on the flight length and trajectory data computed by UMPC.
Both UMPC and secondary fuse are not always reliable and as a result, the Russian bomb doesn’t always fly where it is supposed to go or detonate where programmed, Flesh said. That and other technical weaknesses in the Russian bomb kit system are probable causes for Russian glider bombs hitting Russia by accident, he said.
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