With Bigger Warheads On Bigger Drones & Missiles, Ukraine Is Finally Smashing Russian Factories

Previous deep strikes left little damage

A Fire Point FP-5. Fire Point photo

This story was commissioned by Euromaidan Press. Since Substack pays only around a fifth of my bills, I have no choice but to take on a lot of freelance work. I still want my Substack audience to know where to read those freelance stories, however. Hence this excerpt.

Ukrainian forces are striking deeper and harder inside Russia and Russian-occupied Ukraine, shifting the momentum of the wider war in their favor. One key? Bigger warheads on better drones and missiles.

Two things changed at once. The warheads grew heavy enough to leave damage that lasts, instead of dents a Russian factory could patch in a week. And Ukraine’s drones have peeled back the air defenses that used to stop the shooters from arriving. Heavier warheads decide what a strike does once it lands; the thinning air defenses decide whether it gets there at all.

On Saturday, footage circulated depicting two Ukrainian Fire Point FP-5 Flamingo cruise missiles striking the Titan-Barrikady missile plant in Volgograd, in southern Russia 500 km from the Ukraine front line.

Both of the six-ton cruise missiles slammed into the sprawling factory, which produces artillery and mobile launchers for ballistic missiles.

The strike on Titan-Barrikady is just the latest in a chain of Ukrainian deep strikes targeting refineries and defense plants on Russian soil. Perhaps most dramatically, on 10 June five Flamingos targeted the VNIIR-Progress defense electronics plant in Cheboksary, in western Russia 900 km from the front line.

Read the rest at Euromaidan Press.