Ukraine has stepped up its drone attacks while urging the U.S. to allow use of American-supplied weapons in Russia
By Isabel Coles
August 22, 2024
The Wall Street Journal
Ukraine used aerial drones to attack an air base in Russia’s Volgograd region early Thursday in an escalating campaign of long-range strikes seeking to damage Moscow’s war machine.
Ukraine’s main security and intelligence agency, known as the SBU, said the strike had targeted warehouses containing fuel and glide bombs to degrade Russia’s air power. Russia has made massive glide bombs dropped from warplanes a key weapon in their latest offensives to smash holes in Ukrainian defenses.
Russian authorities in Volgograd said a falling drone ignited a fire at a military air base in the village of Marinovka. Unconfirmed video posted on Russian social media purported to show the Marinovka Air Base ablaze, with thick smoke billowing into the sky. Russia’s defense ministry said it had repelled drones over five other regions overnight.
Ukraine also struck a rail ferry on Thursday that carries fuel between the Russian mainland and the occupied Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, Russian authorities said. Ukraine has sought to use strikes to isolate the peninsula, a key logistics hub for Russia’s war.
Ukraine relies on domestically produced explosive drones to strike deep into Russia as it has few long-range missiles of its own and is barred by the U.S. and others from using Western-provided, longer-range missiles inside Russia. In recent weeks, Ukraine has hit Russian air defenses, fuel and ammunition stores, and aircraft in a series of drone strikes. At the same time, Ukraine is urging the U.S. to untie its hands by permitting use of American-supplied rockets known as ATACMS within Russia. “Our Ukrainian drones work exactly as they should,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said last week. “But there are things that cannot be done with drones alone. Unfortunately, we need other weapons—missile weapons.”
Ukraine’s intensified drone campaign comes as Kyiv’s forces are seeking to consolidate control over a chunk of Russian territory they seized during a lightning incursion into the Kursk border region earlier this month. Zelensky’s office on Thursday released footage of his first public visit to the border region of Sumy, the staging ground for the incursion, where he met with his top general. The president said Ukraine had added one more settlement in Kursk to the several dozen it already controls as well as more Russian military prisoners.
Col. Gen. Oleksandr Syrskiy briefed Zelensky on efforts to strengthen Ukraine’s eastern front line near the strategic towns of Pokrovsk and Toretsk. Russia is advancing on those two towns and has yet to shift significant forces from there to counter Ukraine’s Kursk incursion.
Zelensky said earlier this week that Russia’s muted response to the incursion into Kursk demonstrated the West’s fears of escalation were overblown. “If our partners lifted all the current restrictions on the use of weapons on Russian territory, we would not need to physically enter particularly the Kursk region to protect our Ukrainian citizens in the border communities and eliminate Russia’s potential for aggression,” he said in a meeting with Ukrainian diplomats. “Any further delay by our partners in terms of long-range capabilities is becoming de facto, perhaps, the most effective support for Russia’s offensive potential.”
The Biden administration loosened restrictions on the use of American-supplied weapons after Russia reinvaded Ukraine’s northern Kharkiv region in May, allowing Kyiv to use artillery and fire short-range rockets from Himars launchers against command posts, arms depots and other assets across the border there. But the policy didn’t give Ukraine permission to use longer-range ATACMS missiles inside Russia.
Ukraine has since ramped up drone strikes. Russian authorities said Wednesday they had thwarted a barrage of drone attacks on Moscow and other regions. A strategic oil storage facility in the southern Rostov region burned for days after being targeted in a recent drone strike. Last week, a Ukrainian official said it had conducted its largest drone attack on Russian military airfields since the start of the war, with strikes in Voronezh, Kursk, Savasleyka and Borisoglebsk. And stockpiles of guided bombs were destroyed in a Ukrainian drone attack on the Lipetsk airfield earlier this month.
While drone strikes are inflicting pain on Russia, the damage so far isn’t strategically significant, said Justin Bronk, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London who studies air power and technology. “However, the current rate of damage inflicted on air bases is something that the Russians cannot just accept long term as it would become a serious problem for the [air force] over time,” he said.
By targeting air bases deep inside Russia, Ukraine could compel Moscow to relocate air defense systems away from front-line areas, leaving assets near the front lines more vulnerable to Ukrainian strikes.
The drone strikes may also prompt Russia to move some of its fighter and strike fighter fleets to bases much further away from Ukraine. That has already reduced glide bomb sortie rates by making them fly further on average to and from their bases to the front, Bronk said.
Ukraine has previously shot down Russian aircraft carrying glide bombs, but that requires risking scarce air-defense systems by moving them close to the front lines.
The increasing quantity and range of Ukrainian drone attacks is a growing nuisance for Russia, said Douglas Barrie, a senior fellow for military aerospace at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.
While Ukrainian drones are no replacement for the kind of long-range missiles it wants permission to use, they are forcing Russia to consider where it stations its aircraft and air defences. “The effectiveness isn’t just in hitting the target—it has an effect even if it’s shot down,” he said.
Isabel Coles is a reporter in London covering economics, with a focus on how changes in the economy impact lives and livelihoods. For a decade before that she reported from the Middle East. Beginning with the outbreak of the Arab Spring uprisings, her work tracked the upheavals across the region, from the early hopes for political change through the darker chapters of Islamic State’s takeover in Iraq and Syria. She covered the U.S.-backed military campaign against the organization and its aftermath, including the intensifying geopolitical rivalry between the U.S. and Iran. Her stories often explore how people experience violent change and political upheaval. In 2020, she received an award from the Overseas Press Club of America for a series of stories about a Swedish man’s quest to recover his seven orphaned grandchildren from the ruins of Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate. She was also a finalist for the Livingston Award for Young Journalists. Before joining the Journal in 2017, Isabel worked for Reuters in the Gulf and Iraq. Her work during that period was part of a package that was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. She began her career as a graduate trainee journalist with Reuters.