Russian glide bombs' faulty guidance systems may have led to dozens being dropped on its own territory, military analysts say

• Russia has dropped at least 38 glide bombs on its Belgorod region, according to The Washington Post.
• The outlet cited an internal Russian document intercepted by Ukrainian intelligence.

Faulty guidance systems on Russian glide bombs may have led to dozens of the bombs being dropped on its own territory, military analysts say.

At least 38 glide bombs crashed in the Belgorod region, which borders Ukraine, between April 2023 and April 2024, according to an internal Russian document intercepted by Ukrainian intelligence and passed on to The Washington Post.

At least four were dropped on the city of Belgorod and another seven in the suburbs around it, the document said.

The majority of the bombs were discovered by civilians, and in most cases, Russia's defense ministry didn't know when they were launched, the Post reported.

Some couldn't be recovered because of a "difficult operational situation," the document said.

Cheap guidance systems could be to blame

Glide bombs are older munitions retrofitted with guidance systems that allow them to be launched at a distance.

Russia has been using them to devastating effects against Ukraine, with Russian aircraft able to release them at a safe distance, making it hard for Ukraine to stop them.

But some of the bombs are failing. Ruslan Leviev, a Russian analyst who founded the independent open-source investigation organization Conflict Intelligence Team, said this was probably because of cheap guidance systems known as UMPK kits.

"We think these accidental releases are caused by the unreliability of these kits, something that does not seem to bother the Air Force," he said in a video last month, according to the Post's translation.

Even so, Leviev said his organization estimated that "only a fraction" of the bombs were failing, meaning it had little impact on the weapon's overall effectiveness.

In June, the Russian opposition media channel Astra estimated that Russia had dropped a total of 103 bombs on its own territories over the previous four months.

In March, the Ukrainian minister of foreign affairs, Dmytro Kuleba, said Russia had dropped 700 glide bombs on Ukraine from March 18 to March 24 alone.

Russia was also said to have used a massive 6,600-pound FAB-3000 M-54 bomb in Kharkiv in northern Ukraine for the first time last month, causing a massive fireball upon impact, as seen in video footage.

Ukraine is now developing its own glide bombs and is continuing to request further air-defense systems from its NATO allies.

NATO countries have also eased restrictions on Ukraine's use of their weapons so it can strike Russian targets and repel Russian glide-bomb strikes in and around Kharkiv.

In an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer on Sunday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy urged President Joe Biden to let Ukraine use US-provided long-range missiles, including the ATACMS, to strike airfields deep inside Russia.