Emergency services inspect the wreckage of a drone that crashed into a residential area of Moscow Photo: Alexander Kazakov
It is not only Muscovites who would be shocked by a large-scale impact drone over the Russian capital on Tuesday.
Western observers doubt that Kyiv can threaten the city 500 km from its border.
But Ukraine has long been developing its own analogue of the Shahid 136 suicide drones supplied by Russia from Iran, which have been repeatedly launched into Kiev in recent months.
Ukrainian military intelligence source on condition of anonymity stated that several independent groups of Ukrainian engineers were developing their own versions of the munition.
Kyiv has been using several similar drones for almost a year to strike at targets in Russia.
Previous strikes were smaller in scale, with small numbers and sometimes even single aircraft hitting strategic or economic targets. Among them, the Novoshakhtinsky oil refinery in Rostov in June 2022 or the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol, Crimea, in July 2022.
More recently, the same type of drone apparently used in the attack on Moscow, a Ukrjet UJ-22, was reportedly used in an attempt to target a Gazprom gas compressor station on the outskirts of the city, just over 50 miles from the Kremlin.
What sets Tuesday's attack apart is its scope. More than a dozen drones were reportedly deployed, indicating a more mature capability than many thought Kyiv possessed.
This may be hinted at by the statement of the head of Ukrainian military intelligence, Major General Kirill Budanov, who promises to avenge Russian attacks on Kyiv.
“Our response will not be delayed. Soon everyone will see everything,” Budanov said on Monday.
The drones flying over Moscow in numerous videos posted on social networks are strikingly similar to the Ukrainian Ukrjet UJ-22 Airborne. ' Unmanned aerial vehicle.
This drone model, originally developed as a reconnaissance and light attack drone for the Ukrainian military, has a range of 800 km, according to UkrJet, putting Moscow within range inside Ukrainian borders.
Like the Shahid, it is equipped with a small gasoline engine and can carry the same explosive load.
While Ukraine is developing numerous versions of the Iranian Shahid 136 suicide drone, its foreign partners are also rushing with the purchase of a number of unmanned systems. Among them are the American “Phoenix Ghost”, which has been actively used by the Ukrainian military over the past year, as well as a number of “sophisticated” suicide drones sent by the British government.
Simple, slow flying and relatively easy to shoot down drones like the UJ-22 and Shahid 136 are one of their main strengths.
Easy to manufacture and relatively inexpensive militarily, such aircraft can be produced cheaply and easily on a large scale before being launched en masse in large waves – as seen in Moscow on Tuesday and over the past year to Ukraine.
The success of Ukraine's own drone program shouldn't come as much of a surprise, given the country's proud aviation heritage and still relatively developed industrial base, even after more than a year of all-out war.
After all, this is the same country that gave the world the largest aircraft ever flown, the Antonov An-225 Mriya.
The Russian government was also clearly aware of the possibility of using such a system to hit targets in Moscow and other places inside Russia.
Over the past few months, Russian air defense systems have been redeployed to protect strategically and symbolically important installations inside the country.
In one widely publicized example, in January, a Pantsir-S1 short-range anti-aircraft missile system was deployed on top of a Russian defense system in central Moscow.
The specific use of Pantsir, a system designed to deal with threats at short range, was a good indicator of the threat the Russian military expected to face – incoming drones.
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For the Russians: the appearance of a Ukrainian shahid poses a number of immediate problems.
Firstly, the breakthrough of Moscow's air defenses is extremely embarrassing for the Russian government, demonstrating its inability to protect the capital from a supposed Ukrainian invasion.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has sought to assuage citizens' concerns, but his mention of similar air defense problems at the Russian-controlled Khmeimim Air Base in Syria would hardly have calmed nerves. The Russian capital is not some obscure military facility in a faraway country.
In addition to the obvious symbolic effect, the drone raid may also have a strategic value, forcing the Russian military to redeploy additional air defense assets. assets to protect key facilities in Russia from further Ukrainian drone strikes.
Here, Russia's sheer size works against the country. There are a large number of strategic objects scattered over a huge amount of territory.
What's more, Putin's billionaire friends, many of whom live in affluent neighborhoods hit by Tuesday's attacks on Moscow, can now pressure him to do more to protect the city.
For Ukrainians . , any redeployment of Russian air defense systems from the front line brings obvious benefits to the Ukrainian Air Force at a potentially decisive moment in the war, just before the start of their long-awaited counteroffensive.
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