A Russian Aerospace Forces Su-34 strike fighter working below Battlegroup South has launched guided glide bombs towards a focus of Ukrainian personnel and navy tools. Commenting on the operation, the Russian Defence Ministry reported: “The crew of a Su-34 multirole supersonic fighter-bomber of the Aerospace Forces delivered a strike on amassed Ukrainian manpower and armour within the accountability space of the Battlegroup South.” After receiving a affirmation from reconnaissance that the targets on the designated coordinates had been destroyed, the plane safely returned to its airfield, the ministry elaborated. The Su-34 is the world’s heaviest and longest ranged fighter sort, and has shouldered the first burden of offering air help amongst Russia aviation property throughout nearly 4 years of excessive depth hostilities.
Following preliminary heavy losses using air energy towards Ukrainian frontline models, the Russian Aerospace Forces from early 2023 started to rely more and more closely on utilizing glide bombs to launch assaults from safer distances. The primary unified gliding and correction modules allowed bombs to journey 40-50 kilometres when dropped from altitudes of 10-12,000 meters, earlier than this vary was later elevated to 80 kilometres. In October 2025 the deputy head of Ukraine’s Foremost Directorate of Intelligence Vadim Skibitsky acknowledged {that a} new sort of glide bomb had demonstrated a variety of 193 kilometres, stressing that this might basically alter the dynamics on the frontlines, and was a recreation changer for the flexibility of aviation property to launch low value mass strikes on targets far deeper behind the frontlines. The bomb referred to seemed to be a lately unveiled design with a rocket engine.
Ukrainian Army frontline personnel talking to varied Western media retailers have broadly singled out the consequences of mass glide bomb assaults, stressing that such assaults utilizing bombs with as much as 500 kilograms of explosives have been obliterating their underground bunkers. One serviceman in contrast their impression to “hell’s gates,” stressing that the Russian Aerospace Forces “would ship them two by two by two, eight in an hour… It seems like a jet coming down on you.” These strikes have reportedly been a major contributor to the acute casualty charges suffered by the Ukrainain Army, which had in a number of circumstances approached 80-90 p.c, with life expectancy for personnel on excessive depth frontiers having at occasions been as little as simply 4 hours. In April 2023 Ukrainian ambassador to the UK Vadim Pristaiko acknowledged that authorities have been concealing the total variety of wartime casualties, stating that “it has been our coverage from the beginning to not talk about our losses,” however that “when the warfare is over, we are going to acknowledge this. I feel it will likely be a horrible quantity.”
The Russian Aerospace Forces has continued to obtain a brand new batch of Su-34s constructed to the up to date Su-34M normal, following sustained efforts to broaden manufacturing charges to over double peacetime ranges. The plane have steadily been filmed launching intensive bombardment of Ukrainian and supporting Western forces, together with utilizing significantly massive FAB-3000 glide bombs, bombs with thermobaric warheads, and a variety of air-to-surface missile varieties. Alongside air-to-air and air-to-ground operations, the Su-34 can also be relied on heavy for reconnaissance roles, which is enabled by the mixing of a brand new devoted interface for 3 several types of sensors together with UKR-RT pod for digital looking, the UKR-OE digital camera pod and the UKR-RL which integrates an artificial aperture radar. This has allowed the plane to switch the Soviet Su-24MR in service.
