Ukrainian Drones Are Hunting Russian Air Force Bombers at Their Bases Inside Russia
A recent drone raid targeted a Tupolev Tu-22M base 450 miles from the front line in Ukraine
Two months after shooting down one of the Russian air force’s Tupolev Tu-22M Backfire bombers, the Ukrainian military is hunting down the surviving bombers at one of their bases deep inside Russia.
A video that appeared online on Saturday depicts a Ukrainian long-range attack drone diving toward Mozdok air base in North Ossetia, in southern Russia 450 miles from the front line in eastern Ukraine.
We don’t know what, if anything, the propeller-driven drone struck. We can guess what it was aiming at, however. No later than June 2023, the Russian air force began staging some of its roughly 60 Backfires at Mozdok for missile strikes on Ukrainian cities.
In April, an Airbus Pleiades satellite imaged six Tu-22Ms at Mozdok alongside four Sukhoi Su-24M/MR attack jets and around 20 helicopters. The Russians had painted at least one silhouette of a Tu-22M on the tarmac at Mozdok, apparently as a decoy. It’s not clear how many Backfires were at the base when the Ukrainian drone struck.
As it develops and builds more and better long-range drones, Ukraine has escalated its deep strikes targeting Russian oil refineries, drone factories, strategic radars and air bases. It’s now routine for Ukrainian drones to range 800 miles inside Russia.
The growing number of targets the Ukrainians can hold at risk has forced the Russians to spread out, and thin out, their best air-defenses—making each subsequent drone strike more likely to succeed.
“Airfields have increasingly been targeted by the Ukrainians,” retired Australian general Mick Ryan noted. “While this campaign against Russian airfields began in 2022, it has broadened over time.”
One of the “most spectacular” raids, according to Ryan, was an August 2023 drone strike that destroyed a parked Tu-22M at Soltsy-2 air base, in western Russia 560 miles from the front line. The Russians lost a second Tu-22M to a daring, and lucky, ambush by a Ukrainian air force S-200 surface-to-air missile battery back in April.
The Russians aren’t about to run out of Tu-22Ms. But fully attriting the bomber fleet probably isn’t the point. Ukrainian raids on Russian air bases in occupied Ukraine this spring successfully compelled the Russian air force to redeploy, farther from the front line, around 20 of the roughly 300 warplanes at those bases.
Forcing those planes to stage farther from the front line made them less useful to the Russian air campaign—and less of a threat to Ukrainian troops and civilians.
If drone strikes can compel the Russians to pull back the surviving Tu-22Ms, as well—to, say, bases in northern or eastern Russia—the bombers would have to fly farther and possibly with lighter payloads, potentially slowing the pace of the bomber raids.
Read more:
