Ukraine Has Copied Russia's Best Bomb

Now Ukrainian jets can glide bomb Russian positions

In mid-June, Ukrainian forces counterattacked and liberated the town of Ivanivka in southeastern Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. Russian forces responded with a devastating barrage of KAB precision glide bombs.

One mapper logged 70 bomb impacts along a roughly mile-long ridge stretching east form the town. More widely across the 700-mile front line of Russia’s wider war on Ukraine, the Russians are lobbing around 7,000 KABs a month. Each weighs more than 500 pounds.

The sheer scale and destruction of the KAB campaign has the Ukrainians reeling, and struggling to respond. “The main Ukrainian challenge for the next few months is to counter the massive air guided bombs (KAB) campaign,” mapper Clément Molin wrote in May.

Only a much stiffer air-defense posture can blunt the KAB sorties, but the Ukrainian air force is desperately short of long-range ground-based air defenses and equally short of long-range air-to-air missiles for its small fleet of modern fighters. Sixteen ex-Swedish Saab JAS-39 Gripen fighters should arrive in Ukraine next year. Until then, the Ukrainians can’t do much to stop the deluge of glide bombs.

But they can glide bomb right back. Last month, the Ukrainian government announced that, after 17 months of development, it was ready to deploy locally made glide bombs for the first time. And on Tuesday, a Ukrainian air force Mikoyan MiG-29 may have used the so-called “UkroKAB” for the first time in combat.

“The day has come,” observer Soniah Hub crowed as the two 550-pound, winged bombs blasted ostensible Russian positions in a treeline. (See above.)