A Ukrainian raid reportedly struck a drone warehouse near Oktyabrsky.
David Axe
Forbes
Oct 9, 2024
A Ukrainian attack on a warehouse in southern Russia blew up 400 Iranian-made Shahed attack drones, according to the Ukrainian general staff. That’s nearly five percent of all the 440-pound Shaheds Russia has deployed so far in its 31-month wider war on Ukraine.
Video of the resulting conflagration near Oktyabrsky seems to confirm the strike. “An accurate hit on the target was recorded,” the general staff noted. “A secondary detonation was observed.”
The propeller-driven, satellite-guided Shahed—developed by Shahed Aviation Industries in Iran—is one of Russia’s main weapons for deep strikes on Ukrainian cities. Since acquiring the first Shaheds from Iran in 2022, Russia has launched more than 8,000 of the explosive drones.
Ukrainian air defenses have shot down most of the Shaheds Russian forces have deployed on any given night. According to a tally by Defense News, the Ukrainians have destroyed 91 percent of all incoming Shaheds since March.
But nine out of 100 get through, striking homes and businesses with their 110-pound warheads, maiming and killing indiscriminately. Nearly 600 Ukrainian civilians died and 2,700 were injured in Russian strikes in the three months ending on Aug. 31.
Blowing up 400 Shaheds should blunt the pace of Russian strikes. “Destruction of the storage base of the Shaheds will significantly reduce the opportunity of Russian occupiers to terrorize civilian residents of Ukrainian cities and villages,” the general staff in Kyiv stated.
But it’s a temporary victory. Moscow can always acquire more of the drones from Tehran. It’s also producing copies at a factory in Tatarstan in eastern Russia. The Kremlin paid $1.7 billion, partially in gold, to secure the license for local assembly of up to 6,000 Shaheds.
How the Ukrainians struck that drone stash is unclear. The general staff attributed the raid to the Ukrainian military and counterterrorism ministry. Oktyabrsky is just 140 miles from the front line in eastern Ukraine, placing it within range of a wide array of Ukrainian munitions.
But we can probably rule out Ukraine’s best Western-made munitions—its American Army Tactical Missile Systems rockets, British Storm Shadow cruise missiles and French SCALP-EG cruise missiles. Washington, D.C., London and Paris continue to deny Kyiv permission to use these weapons for strikes on Russian soil.
There are no restrictions on Ukrainian-made munitions, however. Ukraine’s Neptune cruise missiles can reach into southern Russia. And the long-range strike drones the Ukrainian intelligence directorate has developed can range hundreds of miles past Oktyabrsky.
The attack on the Shahed warehouse is part of a wider trend. Rather than expending expensive air-defense missiles to shoot down the drones near their targets, the Ukrainians are making an effort to strike “left of the boom,” to borrow a U.S. military idiom. That is, they’re trying to hit Russian munitions before the Russians can launch them.
The Shaheds aren’t the only targets. Ukrainian raids have also blown up Russian stockpiles of satellite-guided glide bombs. Last week, a Ukrainian drone raid on a Russian air base near Voronezh, 120 miles north of Ukraine’s northern border with Russia, reportedly targeted a warehouse full of bombs.
David Axe – Forbes Staff. Aerospace & Defense. He is a journalist, author and filmmaker based in Columbia, South Carolina. Axe founded the website War Is Boring in 2007 as a webcomic, and later developed it into a news blog. He enrolled at Furman University and earned a bachelor’s degree in history in 2000. Then he went to the University of Virginia to study medieval history before transferring to and graduating from the University of South Carolina with a master’s degree in fiction in 2004.