A Ukrainian Su-24 launches Storm Shadows.
Ukrainian air force capture
On Monday, The New York Times broke the news that U.S. President Joe Biden had authorized Ukraine to fire American-made long-range missiles at targets inside Russia. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky promptly vowed that the missiles would “speak for themselves.”
Hours later, a Ukrainian army battery launched eight 3,700-pound Army Tactical Missile System rockets—each packing up to a thousand grenade-powered submunitions—at a sprawling Russian ammunition arsenal in Karachev, a city in Bryansk Oblast 60 miles north of the Russia-Ukraine border.
The early-morning strike, which left the arsenal in flames, was just the beginning of what could be a powerful campaign of deep strikes aimed at Russian forces and their command and supply infrastructure in and around Kursk Oblast in western Russia.
Following Biden’s lead, the governments of the United Kingdom and France also authorized Ukraine to fire British and French munitions at Russia. On Wednesday morning, Ukrainian air force bombers reportedly flung 10 Storm Shadow cruise missiles at a target in Maryino, a town in Kursk 25 miles from the border.
Exactly what the Ukrainians were aiming at with the 2,900-pound cruise missiles is unclear. But 10 Storm Shadows is a lot of Storm Shadows. The Ukrainian air force usually fires the missiles from low-flying Sukhoi Su-24 supersonic bombers in pairs.
The scale of the attack points to an extremely high value—likely fortified—target. British firm BAE Systems specifically developed the Storm Shadow’s 880-pound Bomb Royal Ordnance Augmented Charge warhead for destroying hardened structures such as underground bunkers.
It’s not for no reason that, when the Ukrainians targeted a Russian navy submarine in a drydock in occupied Crimea in September 2023, they opted to fire at least one Storm Shadow.
According to one Russian blogger, Wednesday’s target was a command post where Russian—and potentially North Korean—officers directed the 50,000 Russian and North Korean troops attacking the 250-square-mile salient that 20,000 or more Ukrainian troops hold in Kursk. The devastating strike on officers and their staffs “resembles an execution of the defenseless,” the blogger moaned.
The strike may have involved a record five Ukrainian Su-24 bombers, each clutching a pair of the precision-guided missiles. Assisted by foreign experts, the Ukrainian air force modified many of its ex-Soviet Su-24s—dozens of which might still be in service, despite heavy losses—to launch Storm Shadows and similar French-made SCALP-EGs.
Launching Storm Shadows, SCALP-EGs and (soon) Ukrainian-made rocket bombs has become the primary mission of the Ukrainian air force’s sole Su-24 unit, the 7th Tactical Aviation Brigade based in western Ukraine.
When Russia widened its war on Ukraine in February 2022, the brigade’s crews were still dropping unguided “dumb” bombs. “Now aviators are focused on the use of Western high-precision weapons,” Ukrainian correspondent Yuri Ignat reported. “Serious strategic tasks.”
Firing a cruise missile at an enemy from 190 miles away is safer than dropping a dumb bomb from directly overhead. But that doesn’t mean the missile strike is actually safe. “Often a Ukrainian pilot works on targets when several enemy missiles are already flying at him,” Ignat wrote.
The risky strikes are worth it. Ukraine builds large numbers of locally developed deep-strike weapons, including rockets, drones and glide bombs, but few of them possess the penetrating power of a Storm Shadow. The British missile is just the thing to burst a buried command bunker.