Russia has increasingly relied on glide-bomb strikes to hammer Ukrainian defenses while keeping its attack aircraft mostly out of harm’s way.
It’s a devastating tactic that underscores Russia’s ability to adapt to some of the problems that have hamstrung its forces, and one that has helped Moscow secure recent battlefield victories. Glide bombs allow the Russians to blast fortified positions from ranges well beyond artillery without exposing their aircraft to Ukraine’s surface-to-air missiles, and what Russia lacks in accuracy it makes up for in sheer firepower. These bombs can weigh up to 6,600 pounds.
Ukraine has also proven that it struggles to easily defeat this threat largely due to a shortage of air defense missiles. And while it continues to expend precious air-defense resources, and additional Western military aid remains out of reach, war experts say Kyiv may end up losing more ground and experienced troops.
“Russia’s employment of glide bombs is really underscoring the extent to which the Russian military is still dangerous,” George Barros, the geospatial-intelligence team lead and a Russia analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, told Business Insider.
“They’re still learning” and coming up with solutions, he said, enabling Russian forces to advance despite some of the issues they’ve had with positional and trench warfare in the past.
Glide bombs have flight control surfaces and are standoff weapons, meaning that attacking aircraft can release them at a distance from a target instead of directly above it (unlike conventional gravity bombs), which helps reduce the aircraft’s exposure to enemy air defenses.
Short flight times, small radar signatures, and non-ballistic trajectories make glide bombs particularly difficult to intercept as well. And while Ukraine has warned throughout the war that these munitions can cause serious problems, the past few months have proven this concern to be especially true.
“Russian forces have significantly increased guided and unguided glide-bomb strikes against rear and frontline Ukrainian positions in 2024, notably employing mass glide-bomb strikes to tactical effect in their seizure of Avdiivka in mid-February,” analysts at the ISW think tank wrote in an assessment last week.
Advanced air-defense systems on both sides kept the skies above Ukraine contested for the first two years of the war. But as Russian ground troops closed in on Avdiivka, a small city in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region, Moscow’s air force managed to barrage Ukrainian defensive positions that supported a major breakthrough.
With the Russian air force able to strike targets for its ground forces that artillery couldn’t reach, Ukraine reported an uptick in glide-bomb strikes in the dying days of its Adviivka defense. Ultimately, Moscow captured the war-torn city, marking its biggest victory in nearly a year.
The Russians are getting better at understanding how the timing and volume of its large strike packages can be delivered to Ukrainian cities and critical infrastructure in a way that best exhausts Kyiv’s air-defense bandwidth, Barros said.
“When the Ukrainian air-defense bandwidth is all tied up, they then move in with the fixed-wing aircraft to conduct these glide-bomb attacks,” he said. “If Ukraine had better air defenses, they might be able to preclude the use of glide bombs by forcing the fixed-wing aircraft to stay further away from the front line.”
In Avdiivka, Russia successfully figured out how to tie up the Ukrainians, thus enabling its employment of extremely destructive glide bombs against Kyiv’s fortifications. Rather than precision, experts say the sheer volume of these barrages made Ukraine’s positions untenable. This has concerning implications going forward, Barros said.
Ukraine has largely denied Russia control of the airspace over the battlefield in the way that Moscow has enjoyed in previous conflicts. In the Syrian Civil War, for example, Putin’s forces supporting the Assad regime relied on widespread carpet-bombing campaigns to obliterate cities.
But now, if Ukraine’s air-defense capabilities are increasingly stretched thin, “then we could potentially be looking at dangerous future scenarios where the Russian air force might be able to operate over Ukrainian skies with impunity,” Barros said.
Russian aircraft have already dropped over 3,500 bombs on Ukrainian positions nearly three months into 2024, Ukrainian Deputy Minister of Defense Lt. Gen. Ivan Gavrylyuk wrote in a March 18 op-ed
for state-run news agency Ukrinform. This is much higher than the previous year, he said.
But despite this high rate of fire, it doesn’t look like there will be a shortage of glide bombs in the Russian arsenal anytime soon.
Last week, Moscow’s defense ministry said production of several munitions types is increasing. This includes the 1,100-pound FAB-500, 3,300-pound FAB-1500, and 6,600-pound FAB-3000 bombs — all of which can be modified and turned into glide bombs.
“What the Russians are doing here is they’re reinforcing a success,” Barros said. In other words, Moscow found a tactic that works, so it’s rapidly scaling up production of these munitions.
Many of the Russian glide bombs are being released up to 30 miles or farther behind the front lines, making it difficult for Ukraine to engage these aircraft with nearly all its air-defense systems beyond the US-made MIM-104 Patriot system, Justin Bronk, an airpower expert at the Royal United Services Institute think tank, told BI.
Glide bombs are only capable of hitting fixed or stationary targets, meaning they’re particularly impactful in areas that have seen long-term fighting, like in Avdiivka, where Ukrainian positions are relatively easy to spot, Bronk said.
“That makes the mission planning for attacks with standoff weapons that can hit fixed targets, like the glide bombs, quite practical,” he explained. “They contain a lot more explosive — particularly the 1,500-kilogram variants — than artillery or rocket artillery shells.”
Because of this, he said, there’s a “qualitative psychological impact that is greater, in many ways, than artillery.”
Ultimately, to help mitigate the glide-bomb threat, the experts said, Ukraine needs a significant boost in air-defense interceptors — in tandem with artillery ammunition — from its Western backers.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has repeatedly said that Kyiv’s existing arsenal of air-defense capabilities is not enough to protect the country
from unrelenting bombardments, frequently calling on his partners to provide more support.
But Republican lawmakers in Congress have yet to end their months-long hold on additional funding to Ukraine, which would unlock much-needed military aid, including air-defense
capabilities and munitions like Patriot missiles, for the country.
The White House on Friday said
it’s “critical” that the US provide Ukraine with more air-defense assets.
Russia’s glide bombs alone will not necessarily determine the war, the experts said, as Moscow also enjoys a major artillery advantage
. But this trend, combined with Ukraine’s diminishing resources and uncertainty over the future of Western security assistance, is making the battlefield outlook increasingly grim for Kyiv.
“Without the US passing the aid supplemental, it’s very difficult to see how the Ukrainians can avoid continuing to lose ground —potentially catastrophically — when it comes to the Russian major offensive in the summer, which will come,” Bronk said.
Barros agreed that if Ukraine doesn’t get a resupply of weaponry, it will ultimately concede territory. And it won’t be entirely the fault of glide bombs — Kyiv needs all the tools its forces can get right now.
“If all things keep the same and the Russians keep with their current pattern of innovation and adaptation, we have no reason to doubt that the Russian air force will become more involved in this war and bring more forces to bear,” he said, “which will ultimately affect the ground domain reality.
