Airports, railway stations, naval bases, communication antennas, fuel depots or commercial districts.
Drone attacks in Russia and in territory controlled by Moscow have intensified in 2023 to more than 160 so far this year. Some, like the one that hit an airport in the Russian city of Pskov this Wednesday, more than 600 kilometers from the border with Ukraine.
Although Kyiv rarely comments on attacks on Russian soil, Ukraine is believed to have increased its use of explosive drones to hit Russia in recent weeks as part of its counter-offensive strategy, hampering Moscow’s ability to supply its troops.
In the last few hours, Ukrainian military intelligence even claimed responsibility for the drone attack against the Russian base in Pskov, which occurred last Tuesday.
In a war where aviation is not being as relevant as in other conflicts, drones have become a fundamental tool for the Ukrainian military forces. They are your eyes on the front, your intelligence and propaganda agents, your watchmen.
They played a very prominent role at the start of the conflict, when they managed, for example, to stop the 40-kilometre convoy heading to Kyiv. And, increasingly, its effects are being felt inside Russian territory.
“Drones are extremely important for Ukraine,” summarizes for BBC Mundo political scientist Sergej Sumlenny, an expert in Eastern Europe and founder of the European Resilience Initiative Center (ERIC).
In the latest wave of attacks, two military cargo planes, a fuel depot and a microelectronics factory were hit by drones in different parts of the country.
Last week, two suspected drone strikes struck Moscow’s main business district, hitting a skyscraper under construction on August 23 and, several days earlier, the Expo Center exhibition complex. Around the same time, three people were killed in a suspected drone strike in the Belgorod border region and five others were injured in the attack on a railway station in the Kursk region a few days earlier, according to Russian officials.
A recent target for drones has also been one of the flagships of Russian aviation, the Tupolev Tu-22M supersonic bomber. One of these aircraft, which can fly at twice the speed of sound, was hit last week at an airbase south of St. Petersburg, according to images verified by the BBC.
How many drone strikes have there been in Russia?
Of the more than 160 attacks detected in Russia and the territories controlled by Moscow, according to information published by Russian media monitored by BBC Verify, most have been concentrated in the Bryansk and Belgorod regions, near the western border with Ukraine, as well as in Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014.
There have also been around a dozen maritime drone strikes against Russian targets in the Black Sea, including naval bases and the Crimean bridge.
The peninsula experienced the largest attack by drones on August 25, when a total of 42 drones fell at the same time on a military base in this territory.
The Moscow region, which is located about 450 kilometers from the border with Ukraine, has also become a target for drones.
One of them, which crashed about 100 kilometers from the capital, appeared to correspond to a UJ-22, a type of drone made by Ukraine that has a range of 800 kilometers in autonomous flight.
To date, Kyiv has not claimed responsibility for these attacks. However, President Volodymyr Zelensky has repeatedly said that attacks on Russian soil are an “inevitable, natural and absolutely fair process.”
What objectives do these drones have?
Achieving a hit on Russian soil has, according to analysts consulted by BBC Mundo, a double objective.
On the one hand, “these attacks are reminding the Russian population that this war is not something that is happening far from their homes and that it has nothing to do with them,” explains Ulrike Franke of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR, European Council on Foreign Relations).
This is especially so, Franke points out, in the case of attacks in and around Moscow. In May, for example, two drones managed to reach the Kremlin and, although they did not cause great material damage, they did manage to pierce the image of security and invincibility projected by the Russian government.
Somehow, “the message these drones send is: the war is here, your capital is not safe and Putin is weak,” adds Sumlenny.
But, beyond the psychological effect that the attacks have, there is also a disruptive component in this strategy.
“It is also sought, for example, to paralyze Russian air traffic, which is completely centralized in Moscow, and slow down decision-making, which occurs when, for example, the government district of the capital is attacked and officials have to leave the offices”, maintains the political scientist.
On July 4, for example, flights had to be diverted from Moscow’s Vnukovo International Airport after a drone attack. Weeks later, the airfield had to close for a couple of days due to new attacks.
Target of these drones have also been oil facilities and energy infrastructure.
The BBC has managed to identify at least nine drone strikes against oil deposits. One of them took place in Sevastopol, the most populous city on the Crimean peninsula, which was attacked on April 29, destroying several of its fuel tanks.
A month later, an oil refinery was burned down in the Krasnodar Territory in southern Russia, some 200 kilometers from the Crimean border. The regional governor said it was probably caused by a drone.
For Layla Guest, an analyst at the security consultancy Sibylline, “it is very likely that the Ukrainian forces will give priority to attacking oil refineries, as well as Russian railway and logistics infrastructure in general, to cause the maximum disruption,” he told BBC Verify. .
Although drones have also had military objectives.
At least 10 Russian soldiers were injured in an alleged drone attack on a military training camp in the Voronezh region on May 10, and in December last year another attack hit an airbase 600 kilometers northeast of the city. border with Ukraine, leaving three people dead, according to the Russian Army.
What kind of drones are being used?
Since the start of the war, Ukraine has been using different drone systems in its operations that fulfill very diverse functions, from surveillance and terrain reconnaissance, as is the case with commercial drones, to attacking specific targets with kamikaze drones. .
Some look like children’s toys, others are huge military aircraft that can reach a wingspan of 15 meters.
One of the most successful for the Ukrainian forces has been the Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2, which had great relevance especially at the beginning of the war, Franke explains.
“Ukraine has made extensive use of various drones, and the Bayraktar TB2 drone emerged as the real star of the air war for Ukraine, inflicting heavy losses on Russian forces, some of which were recorded and circulated online,” he told BBC Verify David Cenciotti, editor of the “Aviationist” blog.
But Ukraine has also increased its local manufacturing of drones, some with highly innovative systems.
“The Ukrainian drone industry is quite impressive, they have managed to develop and manufacture drones themselves over the last year and a half and from what can be seen from the released footage, the systems that have been used to attack Russia are most likely those made in Ukraine”, says Ulrike Franke.
Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation Mikhailo Fedorov recently bragged about a Ukrainian drone, the so-called R18, which he says can “fly from Kyiv to Moscow and vice versa.”
Another of the Ukrainian creations, which began production in 2022, is the “Beaver” drone (“Bober” in Ukrainian, which means “beaver”), with a range of about 1,000 kilometers, according to the “Kyiv Post”.
This drone model appears to be responsible for the attack, at the beginning of August, against the financial district of Moscow, which hit the building that houses the Russian Ministry of Economy.
This state production is supported by an army of hobbyists who got together after the invasion of Crimea in 2014 and began to develop their own models.
In the end, explains the ECFR researcher, “the war in Ukraine is a war of the whole nation, Ukraine is fighting for its survival, so the whole world is involved, also on the drone front.”
A good example of them are those known as First Person View (FPV, piloting with remote vision) that are being manufactured in Ukraine and are being used as kamikaze drones.
“They are unbelievably cheap, can be made for less than $500, and are capable of carrying between two and three pounds of explosives to be used as small munitions, fly directly into a building or moving vehicle, and can destroy any target. unarmoured, like infantry, trucks, or Russian antennas”, explains Sergej Sumlenny.
According to the analyst, FPV drones “are pretty much like smart ammunition but for 1% of the price of high-precision artillery shells.”
These hobbyist groups raise money to buy the electronic components on digital stores like Ebay or Amazon, Sumlenny says, and 3D-print the rest of the parts, then donate them to the military, whose operators use virtual reality goggles to send them against the army. desired goal.
Where are the attacks against Russia being launched from?
So far, Kyiv has not confirmed that the attacks against Russia or Moscow-controlled territory were the responsibility of its military or that the drones originated from Ukrainian soil.
“Although Ukraine has not confirmed that its Armed Forces carried out the attacks [contra Moscú]I think the preemptive raids we’ve seen last year prove that Ukraine has the ability to launch such long-range attacks from inside Ukrainian territory,” Cenciotti said.
In terms of range, experts say drones launched from Ukraine could go deep into Russian territory and reach Moscow, which is about 450 kilometers from the border.
But experts differ as to whether the attacks came from Ukraine or from Russian territory.
For Sergej Sumlenny, many of these attacks, especially those that have occurred in the Moscow region or far from the Ukrainian border, “have had to be carried out from Russian territory by Ukrainians or special forces groups of the Ukrainian Army.”
The ERIC founder alleges that the technical difficulties in balancing weights and explosives, as well as the fuel needed to reach far distances, make it less likely that the drones originated from Ukraine.
Drone specialist Steve Wright, from the University of the West of England, does believe that a drone launched from Ukraine could hit the Kremlin. However, “my opinion is that the drone was launched from much closer, as this would save it from having to engage much of Moscow’s defences,” he told BBC Verify.
Technically, notes Ulrike Franke, Ukrainian drones are capable of reaching such far distances, so the most plausible explanation for it is that they were launched from Ukraine.
“There is nothing to suggest that Ukraine has significant forces in Russia capable of launching days and days of drone attacks from Russian territory without anyone noticing,” adds the researcher.
*With reporting by Paula Rosas, from BBC Mundo, and Jake Horton, Olga Robinson and Daniele Palumbo, from BBC Verify.
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BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/articles/c9ej4xr8n78o, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-09-02 01:50:06
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