In late July, Ukraine said it had struck a Russian Tu-22M3 supersonic bomber at Olenya airbase in Murmansk, a record-breaking 1,100 miles inside Russian territory.
While the news grabbed headlines, it was not the first time that Ukraine has reportedly targeted sites deep within Russia.
In June, the GUR defense intelligence agency said Ukrainian forces had hit a prized Russian Su-57 fighter jet stationed at an airfield in the Astrakhan region of southern Russia, around 360 miles from the frontline.
And in May, Ukraine’s Security Service said a long-range Ukrainian drone struck a Gazprom oil refinery roughly 930 miles away in the Russian republic of Bashkortostan.
Ukraine does not currently have permission to use long-range guided weapons such as the ATACMS to hit such targets inside Russia.
It has instead made use of cheap, domestically-produced drones for long-range attacks, Mark Cancian, a Senior Adviser on the International Security Program at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, told BI.
“These are packed with explosives and flown deep into Russia,” Cancian said.
While striking targets so far from the frontline may be seen as Ukraine spreading itself rather thinly, such attacks have three key benefits, experts told BI.
Physical and economic damage
Strikes on military-related sites, like airbases or defense-industrial facilities, aim to take out or temporarily disable assets that Russia uses to facilitate its war against Ukraine.
And even seemingly small strikes can have a major impact.
In the case of the Olenya airbase strike, which Ukraine later said had damaged two of the Tu-22M3 bombers, Justin Bronk, a Senior Research Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, said that it would have had a “measurable effect.”
“Russia’s active fleet is not large and even the temporary loss of two airframes for missile launch sorties against Ukraine will have a measurable effect,” he said.
Strikes on oil refineries also aim to “hurt Moscow’s pocketbook,” John Hardie, Deputy Director of the Russia Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told BI.
Although, he added, the extent to which they’ve done so is “debatable.”
Russia’s oil revenue in April more than doubled year on year, Bloomberg previously reported, highlighting the Kremlin’s apparent success in rediverting operations.
Reuters reported in April that Russia also appeared to be able to quickly repair some of the key refining facilities damaged by Ukrainian strikes, reducing impacted capacity to roughly 10% from nearly 14% at the end of March, per the news agency’s calculations.
Putting pressure on Russian air defenses
Ukraine is also hoping to “overwhelm Russian air defenses” with “mass” drone attacks, Hardie said, adding that it can be “difficult for air defense systems to detect and shoot down UAVs that are small in size or flying low to the ground.”
“Russia has already adapted its air defense posture following previous drone strikes and reportedly has stood up mobile counter-UAS [unmanned aircraft system] teams. But Russia is a vast country, so defending everywhere is difficult,” he said.
Moscow also started “well after Ukraine in developing countermeasures to the long-range UAV threat,” Hardie added, and it “hasn’t stood up anything like the system of cheap, distributed sensors that Ukraine uses to detect Shahed UAVs.”
As a result, these attacks present Russia with a “serious dilemma,” Bronk said.
Given the vastness of Russia’s territory and the number of potential targets Ukraine could hit, Moscow “is either forced to protect by taking air defence systems away from the frontline areas; or to leave [domestic targets] undefended which results in consistent harassing damage,” he said.
Psychological warfare
Deep Ukrainian attacks within Russian territory also present the Kremlin with a serious political problem — ordinary Russians start to realize that “the state cannot fully defend its own airspace,” Bronk said.
Cancian agreed, saying the “psychological” impact of these attacks was crucial. One of Ukraine’s main goals was “military embarrassment and popular anxiety,” he said.
It shows the Russian people that “there is a price for attacking Ukraine,” he added.
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