Satellite pictures of a Russian airbase taken shortly after Ukraine carried out a deep strike with drones show strategic bombers destroyed or badly damaged. Ukraine targeted at least four airbases across Russia using 117 unmanned aerial vehicles launched from containers close to the targets in Operation Spiderweb. Capella Space, a satellite company, supplied Reuters with images of one of those airfields, located in the Siberian region of Irkutsk, taken on 2 June, the day after the operation.
The synthetic aperture radar (SAR) pictures appear to show the debris of several aircraft located along the runway of the Belaya military airbase or parked in protective revetments nearby. John Ford, a research associate at the California-based James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, said they showed what appeared to be the remnants of two destroyed Tu-22 Backfires – long-range, supersonic strategic bombers that have been used to launch missile strikes against Ukraine. The SAR image, as well as drone footage of the strikes posted on social media, also indicated that four strategic heavy Tu-95 bombers had been destroyed or severely damaged, he added.
Brady Africk, an open source intelligence analyst, agreed that the SAR imagery of Irkutsk airbase showed several Tu-95s and Tu-22s had been destroyed and damaged, although more imagery was needed to properly assess the impact. “But it is clear that the attack on this airbase was very successful,” he said. “The aircraft targeted in the attack were a mix of Tu-22 and Tu-95 bombers, both of which Russia has used to launch strikes against Ukraine.” Africk added that Belaya airbase is home to several flat decoy aircraft, which he said had apparently failed to mislead Ukrainian drones.
Ukraine on Tuesday detonated a massive underwater blast that “severely damaged” the base of pylons holding up the illegally built Kerch Bridge, which connects the Russian-occupied Crimean peninsula of Ukraine to Russia. The signature project of Vladimir Putin was hit with the equivalent of more than a metric tonne of TNT, said Kyiv’s SBU security service, write Peter Beaumont and Artem Mazhulin.
