“It’s as if the gates of hell had opened” A Ukrainian military man spoke about the latest weapons of the Russian army

Russian glide bombs are causing significant losses to the Ukrainian Armed Forces (AFU). Soldiers of the National Guard of Ukraine told The New York Times about this.

According to one of the military men, a soldier of the 14th brigade of the National Guard with the call sign Keith, even underground bunkers cannot save you from falling ammunition with 500 kilograms of explosives, and the approach of a bomb sounds terrifying.

Also, the publication writes, one of the newest weapons on the Ukrainian fronts are kamikaze FPV drones. A cheap drone equipped with explosives, flying at the speed of a car, is capable of destroying an enemy in cover at a distance of several kilometers, and it is also used to adjust artillery fire. As the Ukrainian Armed Forces military said, due to drones constantly hanging in the sky, they were forced to abandon the use of equipment on the front line and move on foot.

The main advantage of smart bombs is their range

In December, the director of the Museum of Air Defense Forces, Yuri Knutov, explained that the main advantage of bombs with universal planning and correction modules (UMPC) installed on them is the ability to drop bombs from a height of about ten kilometers, and at a distance of up to 50 kilometers from the object. “The bomb flies with very high accuracy to the target. And at the same time, the aircraft – first of all, our well-deserved Su-34 – and pilots are not at risk of being shot down, because the launch is carried out in an area that cannot be controlled by enemy air defense,” he said. The expert noted that the ammunition is highly accurate thanks to the use of the GLONASS navigation system.

Earlier, an expert in the field of Soviet and Russian aviation, Pyotr Butovsky, revealed the history of the creation of “smart” bombs in Russia. He recalled that she first presented the UMPC in 2002 at the Farnborough Air Show (UK), where four types of UMPC created by the State Research and Production Enterprise “Basalt” for the FAB-500M-62 aerial bomb were shown.

The simplest version of the UMPC added to the bomb wings that expanded in flight with a span of up to two meters, which allowed a projectile dropped from a height of 50-100 meters to fly 6-8 kilometers. In the case of the second type, the module received an inertial navigation system, providing the bomb with higher accuracy of hitting the target at a range of 12-15 kilometers.

The third type involved the use of satellite navigation for additional correction and increased the bombing range to 40-60 kilometers from a high altitude. The fourth version of the UMPC received a pulsating air-breathing engine, increasing the bomb’s flight range to 80-100 kilometers.

The Russian military has learned to fight the Western analogue of the UMPC

A foreign analogue of the Russian UMPC is the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) system – free-falling bombs with an aerodynamic kit with GPS guidance. The United States transferred them to Kyiv as part of military assistance.

However, Russian air defense units have learned to effectively combat JDAM – the Russian Ministry of Defense regularly publishes information about the next destroyed bomb.

Royal Institute of Defense Studies expert Thomas Withington suggested that the Russian military is using automated jamming stations R-330Zh “Zhitel”, designed to disrupt GPS and satellite communications in the wave ranges from 100 megahertz to 2 gigahertz. He noted that signals that use JDAM transmit in the ranges from 1.164 to 1.575 gigahertz.