Ukraine has been so successful at hitting Russian infrastructure with HIMARS that it’s no longer news when they hit something 100 kilometers behind Russia’s lines.
But when they hit something 600 kilometers away, that’s news.
Several people have been killed in explosions at two Russian military airfields, according to reports.
A fuel tanker exploded killing three and injuring six in an airfield near the city Ryazan, south-east of Moscow, Russian state media is reporting.
Another two people are reported to have been hurt in an explosion at an airfield in the Saratov region.
It is not known what caused the blasts. Both areas are hundreds of kilometres from the Ukrainian border.
Long-range Russian strategic bombers are believed to be based at the Engels airbase in the Saratov region.
Here’s a Suchomimus video on the Engels Airbase attack:
Reportedly two Tu-95 bombers were hit.
He suggests that the attack may have been carried out by a new Ukrainian drone with a reported range of 1,000 kilometers. Whatever it was presumably cost a whole lot less than a strategic bomber.
Ukraine’s ever-increasing range puts a whole lot of Russian infrastructure (military and otherwise) under potential threat. Perhaps Putin should take that into consideration before ordering the next round of attacks on Ukrainian power plants…
Tags: drone, Engels Airbase, Military, Russia, Russo-Ukrainian War, Saratov, Suchomimus, Tu-95, Ukraine, video
Just another accident caused by a careless smoker. Nothing to see here, Comrade.
Russian airmen really should be careful smoking around munition. They can cause synchronized explosion in their airbase.
The Russians are about as bright as the Nazis were; they thought that they’d somehow be immune from blowback, when their own tools and techniques were turned on them.
Guess what? Russia is probably a lot more vulnerable to the sort of infrastructure attacks they’re using on Ukraine, if only because they don’t have the sheltered depth of Western non-combatant economies to draw on for replacement parts. As well, the Ukrainians are actually pretty astute and cunning technologists, who’ve got better ideas about how to wage war on Russia than the Russians have about waging war on Ukraine. Not to mention, they’re also well-motivated by the Russian brutality and uncultured approach to war.
I don’t think the Russians or Vladimir Putin thought this whole thing through very well. They were so certain that they’d get a cheap victory that they never once stopped to consider what the Ukrainians could do to them, in turn.
My guess is that we’re going to see an awful lot of creativity coming out of Ukraine, and that the Russians are going to rue the day that they put Putin into power. I won’t venture a date, but I’m pretty sure that the Russians are going to be evicted from Ukrainian territory in the medium-turn run of things, and that the eventual judgment on this is that this was the decision that doomed the Russian Federation to self-destruction and irrelevance.
If Moscow controls much more than its suburbs after 2030, I’m going to be surprised. I think you’re going to start seeing entire provinces peel off before 2024, taking resources and everything else with them. At which point, they’re going to have to either acquiesce, or concentrate what forces they have on retaining those provinces, re-taking them from the regional governors that are now beginning to realize how fragile a hold that the center really has on them. Not to mention, the increasing odds that trying to retain command under Moscow’s authority is likely to result in their destruction by the people they’re supposedly in charge of.
I suspect that China and other parties are going to be making overtures about just this, and in very short order. The choices that the regional governors are going to have will be to either go down with Putin and his coterie of sycophants in the Moscow region, or join with someone else and survive. The things going on in Azerbaijan and Armenia are the precursor tremors in the vast shoddy edifice which is the Russian state. When the final event arrives, the whole sorry enterprise will likely cave in on itself in very short order, like on the order of days or weeks. It’ll be about like the fall of the Berlin Wall, coming totally out of the blue.
If these were offensive Ukrainian attacks – as opposed to too much Wodka, again – then you can be certain that there was plenty of help from outside. That’s been vexing Russia since before the first, official, breach of the Uke border in February. Reminds me of a Little Rascals episode where two sides were engaged in a 1920’s version of paintball with Alfalfa gleefully supplying ammunition to one of the protagonists. Then Alfalfa got hit.
Be careful what you think you wish for, Spanky.
China looks inward and sees too many people. To the north, they see formerly hostile land defrosting, with very little defense. Whether via diplomacy, economics, or more kinetic means, I wouldn’t be surprised to see China peel off pieces of Eastern Russia for itself.
If Beijing is smart, they’re negotiating this with Moscow right now. Maybe even offering favorable terms – a carrot – before they unleash the stick.
If I remember correctly these are the same Ukrainians that fired off a missile or two that managed to land in Poland killing some Polish citizens. So I find it hard to believe that these same Ukrainians could fire a missile that would travel 600KM and actually hitting the intended target. Just more warmongering propaganda from the West hoping to justify their 100 BILLION USD taxpayer funding of Zelenskyy and the corrupt Ukrainian government.
You don’t expect a difference in capability between twenty-year old Soviet missiles and modern drones? Sure, you go with that.
At the same time, considering Kiev’s caterwauling that those S-300s were Russian launches (pretty sure that’s still their official line,) you may as well ask that if they can hit an airbase 600 km away, maybe hitting the nation next door wasn’t accidental.
I’m making no assertions on what exactly happened in either case; I will assert that assuming there is one Ukrainian stat block that applies to anything the Ukrainian government tries to do is ridiculous.
@Kemmler, that missile was an S-300, a large and very long-ranged SAM. They are supposed to self-destruct if they miss their target, but failures happen.
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