Ukraine's Backfire Bombers Accurately Lead Their Targets

The nocturnal bomber drones patrol as far as 50 miles from the front

A Ukrainian marine corps team is flying its new Backfire drone bombers by night as far as 50 miles behind the front line around Lyman in eastern Ukraine—and dropping grenades on Russian vehicles. (See video above.)

“We own the night,” operator Kriegsforscher reported. “We use different tools for different types of targets.”

Kriegsforscher posted a video of his team at work under the cover of darkness, striking a Russian Ural truck with a clutch of six VOG-17-style grenades fitted with stabilizing fins.

The operator didn’t identify the type of drone involved in the bombing run, but it’s not hard to guess that it was a Backfire.

The Backfire K1, produced by Ukrainian firm Zlі Ptahy, is “a UAV bomber, that effectively destroys enemy targets deep behind enemy lines,” according to the manufacturer.

The drone’s name is an obvious riff on Russia’s own Tupolev Tu-22M Backfire bombers, four of which burned to the ground at bases deep inside Russia during the Ukrainian state security service’s smuggled drone raid on June 1.

The Ukrainian Backfire “has a high payload, excellent range, excellent resistance to enemy radio-electronic warfare, an accurate ballistic calculator and is essentially the complete modern combat drone.”

The reusable drone’s deep-strike capability—it can travel 110 miles round-trip with a roughly 20-pound payload in its belly bay—comes from its fixed-wing design. A fixed-wing drone is more aerodynamic than a helicopter-style drone is. (See a Backfire launching in the video below.)

Lead the target

The downside is that an airplane-type drone can’t hover. It should go without saying that it’s easier to strike a target with a clutch of unguided grenades while hovering than it is to lead a target from a bomber like the Backfire flying 52 miles per hour.

The $62,000 Backfire—which launches via catapult and recovers via parachute—is highly autonomous, but it’s not clear that autonomy extends beyond navigation to targeting and weaponeering.

Despite the drone’s purported “accurate ballistic calculator,” it’s possible a human operator played some role in calculating the lead, triggering the grenades to drop at just the right moment.

Ukrainian forces deploy an array of reusable fixed-wing drone bombers, including bomb-dropping unmanned sport planes that can range many hundreds of miles with a 550-pound payload.

The Backfires are the shallower of the deep-strike fixed-wing bomber drones. But even ranging just 50 miles or so behind the front line is easier said than done. It’s not for no reason that Kriegsforscher has been asking for donations to pay for three ROC-6 amplifier antennas “for better connection with our night bombers.”

“Help Lyman direction,” Kriegsforscher pleaded.

The ROC-6 antennas, each costing around $1,700, operates simultaneously across three popular control frequencies, “ensuring universal compatibility with modern drone systems,” according to Chinese manufacturer Acasom.

Fitted to a 45-foot mast, the amplifier has the effect of “significantly extending your drone's effective range while maintaining crystal-clear signal integrity.”

In ranging 50 miles behind the front to drop bombs, the Backfire fulfills an important part of an ambitious Ukrainian plan for controlling the air over the front line. The plan is to “have layers of drone superiority,” explained independent American analyst Andrew Perpetua.

One layer ends at six miles, another at 12 miles, a third at 25 miles, a fourth at 31 and a fifth at 62 miles. The Backfires patrol between the fourth and fifth layers, especially at night, interdicting Russian troops and supplies before they can reach the line of contact.

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