I’m pooped, so basically you’re just getting Patron tonight. With the exception of this one point from last night regarding the Ukrainian strike on Russia’s air force base in occupied Crimea. The Kyiv Post has reported that it seems that the weapon system that was used to target the Russian air force base is most likely a Ukrainian developed (home grown) weapon system:
A day after a wave of unexpected and destructive strikes against a critical Russian air force air base in Crimea, evidence was mounting on Aug. 11 that the weapon used most likely was a highly-capable Ukraine-produced missile system possibly thought by Moscow not to be in operation.
Saky air base, as the missile flies, is at least 150 kilometers from the closest launch sites usable by Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF) units. Until Tuesday, it was unclear to the Kremlin and independent observers alike whether Ukraine had a weapon capable of shooting even close to that distance.
Ukrainian military sources on Wednesday said that the Saky strikes destroyed at least nine Russian air force planes parked at the base, and detonated multiple munitions depots. Kyiv official sources made no comment on how, and by what means, the attacks were carried out.
Andriy Tsaplienko, a high-profile Ukrainian military journalist, in an August 10 Telegram post said that the only possible tool Ukraine has to cause all that damage, at that range, was a weapon called the Grim heavy missile launcher. Other sources said the evidence supporting Grim systems as is not conclusive.
Also known as Sapsan, the truck-mounted Grim system was developed by Ukraine’s Dnipro-based Yuzhmash aerospace company from 2013-2019. Twin missiles carried aboard would have a range of at least 280 km – twice the reach of the Ukrainian army’s aging Tochka-U rockets, and four times the range of US-delivered HIMARS missiles known to be operated by the Ukraine Armed Forces. Each Grim missile, per design, carries close to a half ton of explosives, and is, per Yuzhmash advertising, capable of pulverizing 10,000 square meters of target area.
Fielding the Grim was slow and difficult, due to limited financing of Ukraine’s defense sector, the exacting tolerances in ballistic missile manufacturing, and Kyiv’s loss of access to Russian-manufactured parts after Russian invasion of Crimea and Donbas in 2014. By 2019 only two systems had reportedly been built: one a test copy for the Ukrainian military, and one a sample for overseas arms sales, possibly to Saudi Arabia. In 2021 Ukraine’s Defense Ministry announced it intended to field a “division” of Grim systems, without saying when or how the systems would be paid for.
Some well-informed military observers suggested talk of Grim missiles hitting Crimea could be misdirection. “I think a Grim is just a clever cover for the actual means to deliver that long-range strike (on Saky),” said Oleksii Izhak, an analyst for Ukraine’s National Institute of Strategic Research. “Targeting and control systems need some testing and (the missiles) were hardly tested in real flights.”
“But it (combat use of multiple Grim systems against Saky) is possible…and I hope it is,” Izhak added. He is a former Yuzhmash staffer.
Much, much more at the link.
The important takeaway here is still not what was used to blow up the Russian air force base – long range missiles supplied by the US and/or its allies, Ukrainian developed and previously unknown long range missiles, Ukrainian SOF and/or Ukrainian partisans striking the base from within Crimea – but that Ukraine has now demonstrated that it can reach out and touch Russia deep within the Ukrainian territory Russia is occupying. The effect here is more important than the delivery system that blew up the air base. Ukraine’s successfully carrying out this strike and being strategically ambiguous about it in their communication is very effectively telling Putin, the Russian military, Ukrainian collaborators, Russians on vacation in Crimea, and the world: “We can reach out and touch you on every inch of Ukrainian territory you are occupying! No part of Ukraine is safe for you! Sleep well!” To go all Sun Tzu for a moment, Ukraine has just signaled to Russia that for them all of Ukraine is now deadly ground. And as Sifu Sun teaches us: “On deadly ground: flee!”
Your daily Patron!
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— Patron (@PatronDsns) August 10, 2022
And here is a new video from Patron’s official TikTok:
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The caption translates as:
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Open thread!
On the Ground Reporting from Organizations We Have Been Funding!
dmsilev
Also, “those logistics dumps that you moved to be 100 km back from the front so that they were out of range of HIMARS strikes? Guess what?”. How many supply trucks does the Russian Army have available, and what will doubling the round-trip distance between depot and front-line units do to the latter’s effectiveness?
Patricia Kayden
Get better, Vesta!!
zhena gogolia
Beegees!
I did enjoy the video of Russians in a probka trying to get out of Crimea.
David 🌈☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
Ukraine just clobbered a russian air base in Belarus
jackmac
Adam, with effective home-grown weapons systems like the Grim system (and no restrictions imposed by the U.S. or other allies who supply other weapons) how tempting might it be for Ukraine to also start targeting military sites inside Mother Russia?
Elizabelle
I live for Patron.
And good on Ukraine, for its resilience, resourcefulness, and courage.
Martin
Russia is really acting like they’re out of gas. Ukraine isn’t taking back any notable territory, but Russia seems entirely on the defensive right now. I suspect time favors Ukraine right now.
Gin & Tonic
@zhena gogolia: As of a couple of hours ago, it was still bumper-to-bumper heading to the Kerch bridge.
Gin & Tonic
Take care of yourself, Adam.
Old School
Has Patron retired from active duty?
I can’t find any definitive answer in my search.
West of the Cascades
@David 🌈☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch: Sounds like a whole lot of battlefield shaping going on!
Elizabelle
@Old School: Wondering if Patron is more a Colonel in the Morale Patrol now.
Hoodie
@Gin & Tonic: Interesting to know what segment of the Russian population lives in or vacations in Crimea and whether news of Russian vulnerability will bypass the propaganda channels as they disperse across Russia. I recall it includes a lot of military retirees and other middle class Russians, kind of the Putin equivalent of Florida Trumpers. That was a 2×4 in the teeth in what was assumed to be a well protected area.
Frankensteinbeck
The longer that Russia doesn’t know how this was done, the better for Ukraine. “You don’t know the limits of what I can do” is a powerful psychological and tactical weapon.
Gin & Tonic
@Hoodie: Yes it was, which is why I said last night that doing it in broad daylight had strategic value all its own.
trollhattan
@Hoodie: So many videos posted from the touristy looking beach–it was sudden and violent to be sure, and some had audio of car alarms going off, implying to me the shock waves were really powerful, because the base was far away.
Like the Moskva sinking, this forces Russia to recalculate some things.
Kent
And they are fleeing. Apparently there is still a 24 hour traffic jam of cars trying to flee across the Kerch Bridge back into Russia. Pictures of this tens of miles long traffic jam are all over Twitter. Heh!
Rats fleeing a sinking ship.
Hoodie
@Gin & Tonic: I imagine most civilians came to crimea via the Kerch bridge, so the prospect of the bridge getting blown and trapping them there scared the hell out of a lot of them.
kalakal
Those videos last night were taken by people who knew what was going to happen and were within a few miles of the dumps. There’s no sign of missile trails before the explosions. It occurs to meet that if Ukraine had agents there ( the video operators) they could have others and that Switchblade 300 drones have a range of 6 miles, fly very low at between 60 & 100 mph, can be preprogrammed and carry a charge equal to a small grenade. They’re really hard to detect as they’re tiny & silent. Slamming a few of those into an ammunition dump would have an interesting effect.
The entire system fits into a small backpack
Mike in NC
Blow the Kerch Bridge to hell and gone to give Russian civilians a taste of what Ukrainians have lived with the past several months.
Adam L Silverman
@Gin & Tonic: I’m just tired. Been a busy week.
Adam L Silverman
@Patricia Kayden: I’m good, just tired. Been a busy week.
Jinchi
@Kent: I’m always suspicious of pictures on Twitter. Has the massive exodus been confirmed?
Carlo Graziani
Misdirection. I don’t believe a word of it. Those missiles ought to have been descending on ballistic trajectories and would have been caught in a few frames of that footage shot from that apartment window that caught both simultaneous explosions. Plus, the simultaneity of the explosions speaks to a high precision guidance, if they were missiles at all. At a 300 km range, that would be basically ATACMS Unitary-equivalent, which would be kind of wasted on that target. It’s well-orchestrated bunk to scare the Russians. A magic trick. Well done the UA.
CaseyL
Ukraine bombed Crimea and Belarus? With missiles they made themselves? This is fantastic news!
Carlo Graziani
@kalakal: This is a much better theory.
Jinchi
@CaseyL: CNN had a report of explosions at the Yeysk port in Russia in the Sea of Azov as well.
Jinchi
@kalakal: Would a munitions dump be that vulnerable to a grenade sized explosive?
Kent
There are pictures and videos of massive traffic jams in Crimea all over twitter. I doubt they are all fakes. They are taken by frustrated Russians sitting in their cars. I don’t read or understand Russian so who knows.
kalakal
@Jinchi: That is the weak point in my theory. I was thinking of the dumps being hit by quite a few of them simultaneously, each system is 5 drones and the launcher so at team of say half a dozen agents could launch 30 within a few seconds. Their bigger cousin the 600 can take out an MBT ( the warheads based on a Javelin) so would definitely cause a big boom. They’re about 4 ft long and the systems man portable but would be harder to smuggle in. The flight characteristics are similar to the 300 but the range is longer (25 miles) so you’d have a much larger area to sneak it into
YY_Sima Qian
Extremely impressive work by the Ukrainian Armed Forces on the air base!
Satellite images show large impact craters from large unitary warheads, which would rule out Switchblade type of munitions launched by SFs or partisans. The targeting was quite accurate, taking out maintenance sheds, & fuel & munitions dumps. The RuAF aircraft were parked in earthen sloped revetments, which should have deflected the blasts from the unitary warheads, yet many of the planes have been utterly obliterated, some in locations that should have been shielded from the blast waves. The planes are unlikely to have munitions on the pylons during the attach, but possibly fuel in the tanks. Makes me wonder if missiles w/ sub-munitions were also employed, in addition to those w/ unitary warheads.
I understand Ukraine has been developing ballistic missiles, but the accuracy is very impressive. Perhaps the US has helped w/ the guidance package?
This attack will be analyzed w/ great interest by militaries around the world. A war across the Taiwan Strait will likely open w/ a massive barrage of ballistic & cruise missile (assumed to have precision guidance) from the Chinese PLA to targets on Taiwan & Penghu Islands, including the latter’s hardened air bases. Depending on whether the US gets involved, that barrage might also target US bases on Okinawa & Guam, which are less hardened.
YY_Sima Qian
@Carlo Graziani: Ballistic missile warheads re-enter at high Mach numbers, video may not be able to capture them at all. If the warheads are separated from the booster stage after launch (as most modern ballistic missiles do, as opposed to the Scuds), they would not be that large, either. However, heat from friction w/ air during re-entry probably should have left a visible trail. The impact craters are also not as deep as one might expect from a warhead coming down at > Mach 5.
Cruise missiles are another possibility. Subsonic anti-ship cruise missiles repurposed for land attack? Ukraine has many more of those than any ATACMS the US can spare or any ballistic missiles it could have manufactured since the start of the war. However, I think the air base is out of range of any ground launched AShCM from Ukrainian held territory.
Gin & Tonic
This sequence of tweets is a real hoot.
kalakal
@YY_Sima Qian: As the satellite imagery rules out switchblades my next thought would be long range cruise missiles. The AngloFrench StormShadow/SCALP has a range of about 350 miles and can be air or sea launched, not sure about ground. If Ukraine has anything like that it would certainly be up to the task
ETA just looking at the satellite images, I see what you mean, those individual revetments being hit is impressive
Another Scott
@Gin & Tonic: From the giant explosions, I figured that the ammo dumps were the main/only target. Then one sees the satellite pictures of the blown-up jets and it looks (but I’m no expert) like they were individually targeted. So that may explain all the smoke before the big booms – there were lots of munitions targeting lots of things, and then the ammo dumps exploded.
(via oryx on Twitter)
OTOH, there’s more video of someone walking around past a bunch of damaged cars, including one that had a helicopter blade impaling it, so maybe enough stuff was flying from the big explosions that that was all that was needed.
In any event, VVP and Wagner and all those invaders should be very worried. They probably won’t learn the correct lesson (that they need to leave NOW) though…
Thanks.
Grrr…,
Scott.
Bill Arnold
The Russians will determine what weapons were used, and adjust accordingly, in ways that will be observable.
The (obligatory “apparent”) attack on the Russian air base in Belarus will also be worry-inducing for the Russians (and to Aleksandr Lukashenko). They may start pushing harder for a cease-fire.
Carlo Graziani
@YY_Sima Qian: The ballistic trajectory would definitely have left a plume trail above those clean ground fireballs, which is exactly my point. Missiles are completely ruled out by that footage, as far as I’m concerned.
I’m skeptical about cruise missiles too. The timing coincidence of the two fireballs is too weird. It is extremely difficult to formation-fly two robot aircraft hundreds of miles and have them strike adjacent targets inside a second of each other.
wombat probabilty cloud
@zhena gogolia: Had to look up “probka.” What a wonderful figure of speech. Thanks.
Bill Arnold
@Carlo Graziani:
Al-Qaeda in the late 1990s/2001 used synchronized attacks as a call sign, basically. I recall watching (on TV) the second plane hit the World Trace Center in NYC, and thinking Al-Qaeda in a second or two.
YY_Sima Qian
@kalakal:
@Another Scott:
I don’t think the aircraft in revetments were individually targeted – no impact craters in the middle of the wreckage. The maintenance sheds & the parking apron where specifically targeted by unitary warheads. Haven’t seen satellite photos of the ammo & fuel dumps.
That is why I am thinking sub-munitions, which then caused the aircraft to burn up from internal fuel. However, ground level photos & videos don’t seem to show evidence of sub-munitions, either.
Gin & Tonic
@YY_Sima Qian: Christo Grozev was showing a video of apartment blocks 1.6 km away with all their windows blown out. Some big booms; I’m no expert, but how many aircraft burned up as a result of those booms, as opposed to being directly targeted?
YY_Sima Qian
@Gin & Tonic: The sloped earthen revetments should have deflected the blasts, that was their purpose, designed to minimize damage from carpet bombing by heavy bombs in WW III. From the satellite photos, planes in some of the revetments are obliterated, while others in adjacent revetments seem structurally intact. It is IMO inconsistent w/ effect from large radii blast waves. Also somewhat undermines the sub-munitions thesis, but that would depend on the number of missiles used, & the spread pattern of the sub-munitions.
Jay
Weirdness, again.
Can’t paste, screen keeps constantly scrolling. I phone.
https://mobile.twitter.com/status/1557233002815569921
Carlo Graziani
@Bill Arnold: There’s “synchronized” and synchronized. Those fireballs were simultaneous.
Look, I think maybe misdirection, in the sense that stage magicians use that word, is the key here. We have an attack that looks like it could have been carried out by advanced weaponry, and the UA is implying that it has homegrown ATACMS-near-equivalent tech. On the other hand, there are several things that don’t fit. Two ammo dumps blow up making clean, simultaneous ground fireballs with no evidence of a descending plume over either of them. No plumes anywhere, in fact, but lots of craters, damage consistent with submunitions, perhaps from multiple munitions. On a target of really marginal military value. Great, showy terror value, to be sure, but if you had secretly developed your superweapon capable of carrying, say, 100+ kg of HE a few hundreds of kilometers, is this your big reveal? You’d have to be an idiot. Especially if you were about to launch your big counter-offensive.
But suppose you consulted a stage magician, and asked her how to produce the effect of a 300 km rocket strike. Well, someone experienced in misdirection might say “Use little drones to arrange a couple of big, showy explosions at ammo dumps, to distract from the mortar rounds that you are lobbing in from a courtyard in a completely different direction”. Or some such thing. And then announce your superweapon.
I don’t know that this would be the best way to do it. But I have a very strong feeling that we’re being hoodwinked. None of this makes sense.
YY_Sima Qian
@Carlo Graziani: I think you are overthinking it. :-P
The air base is not a target of marginal military value. Those Su-24 fighter bombers & Su-30 multi-role fighters definitely could have had an impact against the Ukrainian Army in a counter-offensive toward Kherson. Yes, Ukrainian SAMs & MANPADs would have been a threat to them, as they have been throughout the current war, but the Russians would have thrown everything against the thrust.
Assuming cruise missiles are GPS guided, it is fairly straight forward to set their paths so that they arrived at their targets at the same time, that is late Cold War tech. If the air base dates back to the Cold War (I assume it is), then it should have fuel & munitions dumps underground. That would have taken some kind of ground penetrating warhead to destroy, usually not found on cruise missiles (typically found on free fall bombs or ballistic missiles). OTOH, perhaps the fireballs we have seen are the above ground fuel & ammo dumps blowing up, while the underground ones remain intact.
kalakal
@Carlo Graziani: hmm, interesting. That could be synchronized. The IRA had a tactic years ago whereby you’d take a truck, fill the bed of the covered trailer a couple of feet deep in sand, into which you place 20/30 or so crude home made one shot mortars at a slight angle. Basically a metal tube with an electrically detonated charge at the bottom and a bomb on top of that. Park the truck at the appropriate distance depending on the angle of the tubes,set a timer linked to all the charges and walk/drive away. When the timer goes off you’re miles away. Inaccurate but good enough to splatter all over a target the size of an airfield. In theory could sync that to coincide with a the arrival of a couple of switchblade 600s. Not sure if that would do the trick but you could get
Carlo Graziani
@YY_Sima Qian: Please. The Russians can’t even do this accurately with cruise missiles any more — they exhausted the supply that they had developed back in early May. We’re to believe that the Ukrainian military-industrial complex contracted out a cruise missile research project, which was successfully tested, worked free of bugs, and moved to production, during 6 months of total-war crisis? That’s magical thinking.
Ukrainians are defending themselves heroically. They are certainly not mobilizing industrial technology to produce superweapons.
patrick II
Perhaps someone on one of the delivery trucks or working at the depot attached a cell phone to the primer of a couple of the munitions stored there, went back to the apartment, turned on the cameras and gave the cell phones a call.
The Ukrainian subterfuge is partly cover for their underground, at least until they can clear the area.
Jay
@Carlo Graziani:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hrim-2
dr. luba
@Jay: Yes, Hrim, not Grim. Thunder.
Marc
There is also the mysterious case of the 500 “scrapped” Ukrainian KH-55 cruise missiles with conventional warheads. Six were later sold to China and another twelve to Iran (see Wikipedia and elsewhere). Ukraine also likely kept some (why wouldn’t they?). With a simple avionics upgrade (basically, a modern dual-band GPS receiver) they’d be quite capable of accurately punching nice big holes. They’d just have to improvise a way of launching the things (say detachable launch dolly or solid-fuel booster). Much more likely to work reliably than early prototypes of a ballistic missile.
Jinchi
@Bill Arnold: Interesting point and it may explain why the video from the hotel room was pointing at the exact spot at the perfect time to catch the two big explosions. If there was already smoke coming from the site, anyone might have started filming in time to catch the big event.
Carlo Graziani
@Jay: Yes, but, again, we can be certain that this was not a missile attack, because ballistic missiles on supersonic terminal descent trajectories would have left visible plumes above the fireballs in the video of the explosions, instead of producing two clean spherical fireballs rising from below.
The argument was about whether the Ukrainians had developed sophisticated precision-guided cruise missiles, which had flown in formation and struck those two ammunition dumps within a second of each other, while somehow also managing the trick of cratering the airfield and wrecking all those planes. So, a fleetlet of precision cruise missiles, at a minimum. Which is a trick the Russians can’t even pull off any more, having exhausted the supply that they spent decades developing and manufacturing.
So no, I don’t believe the remote superweapon theory. The Ukrainians are definitely fucking with the Russians’ minds as far as I can read the evidence. And good for them.
NotoriousJRT
@Elizabelle: As the owner of a JRT, I’ve always thought morale was Mr. Patron’s true MOS.
Carlo Graziani
One other thing: if it had been a Ukrainian missile attack of some form, US satellite, airborne, and ground-based IR and/or radar assets would have spotted it. Very likely this would have been already divulged to the press on background, or will be within a day or two. If it is, or isn’t, or if the administration starts cracking jokes about it, we’ll know.
Carlo Graziani
@kalakal: I remember the IRA tactic now. That’s probably what I was thinking of subconsciously.
It would leave behind the evidence, though. Nowadays you could do a bit better: you could go on the International arms market and buy, from one of Viktor Bout’s assistants or some other Russin merchant (this is the amusing part) a dozen or so 2B25 Silenced Spigot Mortars, which the Russians issue to Spetsnaz. Then you’d have UA SOF set up the mortars the day of the attack behind some construction fencing near the airfield, out of direct line-of-sight of tall buildings, say, besides a trash truck. Line up the mortars on the airfield.
At T=0, a confederate sets off a showy explosion in or near the airfield, by means of a drone, an ANFO barrel, an IED, whatever — this would be the smoke at the beginning of that video. This would also draw all eyes away from your construction site for a few seconds.
So at T=2 sec you set off all the mortars, which fire 2kg explosive warheads at the field. The 135dB coughs that they make are not going to be noticed in the pandemonium, nor are their trajectories. Now you and your team pack up the 13 kg mortars into their cases, throw them into the trash truck, bury them under a half-ton of garbage and calmly drive away, while the panicked Russian soldiery points their weapons at the sky.
lee
“Ukrainian SOF and/or Ukrainian partisans striking the base from within Crimea ”
As a grunt, I am obligated to put my money on this option.
Marc
Carlo, I know not to engage in arguments about the politics of the Ukrainian war here, as I know I’d lose badly. However, this is straying into technical areas that overlap things I do know something about. And, of course, if Biden had announced last week that we had shipped them some ATACMS missiles, I’m sure the comments now would be more like “ATACMS, fuck yeah!”, even if all there was to show was a few big holes in the ground. If they had been given Tomahawks, same response, no need to consider other options.
There seems to be irrefutable evidence that Ukraine was in possession of at least 18 Tomahawk-equivalent KH-55 cruise missiles after they had been paid by the US (and Russian) government to destroy them. Which strongly suggests they had more. This is not a homegrown super-weapon developed in a few months in the midst of a war, the KH-55 jet engines (and, it seems, the guidance system) were designed and manufactured in Ukraine when it was part of the SU. Some of those Ukrainian engineers are no doubt still around. They probably have all of the manuals and design documents. There would be no issue modifying some to disperse sub-munitions (which would explain some aspects of this attack), but since the Soviets had already developed such warheads for the KH-55, they may well have left some behind. The main issue is finding some means of launch, assuming the Ukrainians no longer have TU-160s. An SU-27 could likely carry a pair, no need for systems integration other than modified pylons, as the desired way points (and arrival times) could be pre-programmed on the ground. Or, with appropriate modifications to the flight control software, you could literally push one off the tail ramp of a transport.
If they still have those KH-55s (or even manufactured new ones, like the Iranians) there are reasons why everyone will keep quiet. The US won’t talk about it, as we likely paid several hundred million dollars to the Pentagon, various defense contractors, and the Ukrainian government, to oversee their destruction, due to the significant proliferation concerns (which happened anyway). There are likely still people in the USG who don’t want to answer questions about that.
The Russians might not want to talk about it, as who would volunteer to explain to Putin that Ukraine has leftover Soviet weapons that can be launched from Ukrainian territory and easily deliver a 500 kg HE warhead with meter-level accuracy to Moscow? A particularly hard discussion, since it’s becoming clear that Russian defenses would likely fail to intercept. And, of course, the Ukrainians would want to keep their “super-weapon” quiet and only use them for high value (military or propaganda) targets.
Mostly speculation, of course, as is the notion that a team of Ukrainian SOF/partisan solders could enter an active Russian military base in broad daylight, manage to place fairly large timed explosive charges in just the right spots to maximize damage, use oversize toy drones to drop distraction charges and blow up some planes, then conveniently escape so the Russians have no bodies to show on TV. A nice story that fits the “Scrappy Ukrainians” meme, but not necessarily the truth. I’ll go back to lurking…
Bill Arnold
@Marc:
People will be observing how Russian defensive (and offensive) postures change, yes; it was a surprisingly long-range strike.
Carlo Graziani
@Marc: I don’t mind at all, and I hadn’t read or heard about those. So ok, maybe. If that’s what happened, though, there must be a few hundred Russian eyeballs that actually saw them in flight, so there’s no explanation for the apparent confusion that the Russians appear to be suffering from. And no real reason for the Ukrainians to be secretive or coy about their messaging.