Glide bombs, missiles and drones: The aerial bombardment raining down on Ukraine’s troops around Kharkiv

Missiles, glide bombs – with attached wings or GPS – rockets and drones. This is the aerial bombardment raining down on Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region, launched by Vladimir Putin’s forces from inside Russia.

It has been backed by a ground assault, as thousands of Moscow’s soldiers have poured across the border and tried to push towards the city of Kharkiv itself. The fiercest battles have focused on the town of Vovchansk, close to the border and around 40 miles from Kharkiv. Russian forces initially overcame weak Ukrainian fortifications, penetrating a few miles and capturing two pockets with a total area of about 50 square miles.

They took a string of villages before Ukrainian reinforcements stemmed their advance. On a visit by The Independent to the area, a Ukrainian army vehicle, with only three wheels, clattered to a halt on the road. As one of his comrades pulled out tools and started work repairing the vehicle, a soldier codenamed “American” explained what had happened to the wheel: “A Russian drone with a bomb spotted us on the road. We were racing as fast as possible but couldn’t outrun it. It dropped its bomb but luckily, it hit the asphalt, not us. But it still destroyed our wheel.”

American said that as soon as the wheel was fixed, they would return to the front lines around Vovchansk. He said his unit was transferred from another part of Ukraine’s 600-mile-plus front lines. He would not say where from but said they had been deployed to Vovchansk on 7 May because, by then, it had become clear that Russian forces, massing across the border, were readying for action. The attack started on 9 May.

He said: “The Russians are using everything against us. The fighting is all close to their border and easy for them to haul up reinforcements and armoured vehicles. And they can shell us from their side of the border as well as fly in with helicopters and planes.”

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“When they started their attacks they first used their newly conscripted forces for storming [ground assaults]. You know why, don’t you?” Answering his own question, he continued: “They were using them as expendable meat to tire us out and locate our positions. You could see they were young and new and we killed bunches of them. Then they would send in their more experienced men.”

American said Russian forces had taken some northern areas of the town with some entrenched in a factory and there was street fighting as the Russians tried to take more ground. As he spoke, you could hear regular explosions, the “whoosh-whoosh” of salvos of “Grad” rockets taking off and the whirring of drone engines.

Both sides have scores of drones in the air at any time for surveillance and attacking their enemy. American was lucky but many of his comrades have been killed when “suicide” drones, flying at 60mph have chased them into their bunkers or trenches.

But the soldier admitted that glide bombs presented the biggest danger and were being deployed massively by the Russians. Ukrainian commanders have said glide bombs are hampering efforts to halt the Russian advance – essential to prevent Moscow’s forces from getting within the 18-mile range its artillery needs to shell Kharkiv city.

Glide bombs, also called KAB – the Ukrainian acronym for guided aerial bomb, are old-fashioned “iron” aerial bombs of the sort that were dropped by bombers during the Second World War. Russia is believed to have hundreds of thousands of such bombs in warehouses. It has converted them, cheaply and simply, into a type of guided bomb by fitting some with GPS guidance systems and attaching wings, which allow a gliding descent that extends their range considerably.

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They have proved difficult to intercept and Ukrainian soldiers can no longer rely on their trenches and bunkers to protect them from the bombs, some weighing one and a half tons. They also pack 30-80 times as much explosive as the artillery shells their shelters were expected to withstand.

“KABs are causing great devastation,” American said. “They can demolish entire buildings and we know that even if you’re in a deep bunker hit by one, you’re probably dead.”

Kyiv estimates more than 200 glide bombs were used by the Russians around Vovchansk last week, levelling much of the town.

Many of the dozens of civilian casualties have been caused by glide bombs. Of the civilians left in the area, Lilia, 66, is one of those evacuated by the police. She lived with her 86-year-old mother, south of Vovchansk in the little village of Hrafske. Despite fierce fighting and explosions nearby, she said her mother had not wanted to leave their home, one of many bucolic cottages and some mansions, used as country getaways, set amongst woods of tall pines. But she called for evacuation when her mother was killed by what was likely a glide bomb which landed in their garden two days earlier.

The police brave the drones and bombs multiple times daily, to rescue civilians who are brought to a collection point to be picked up by larger vehicles that drive them to refugee centres in Kharkiv city.

The Independent was at one collection point minutes after three glide bombs exploded. Fortunately, the evacuees and rescuers had left before the bombs struck, but the centre was wrecked and the trees surrounding it had been felled or shredded, with branches still smoking.

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On Sunday, a strike by two missiles killed at least seven people, including a seven-month-pregnant woman, and wounded many others at a holiday resort just north of Kharkiv city.

The lakeside resort, at Cherkaska Lozova, looked, until 11.02am on Sunday, similar to the sort of holiday destination tens of thousands of Britons will visit this summer in countries like Greece, Turkey, Spain and Portugal.

But after the missiles landed, the pretty pine cabins assembled around a swimming pool with a bar and eating areas were shattered by shrapnel and the main building was reduced to matchwood.

The region’s chief war crimes prosecutor, Oleksandr Filchakov, told The Independent that he believed the attack was a “double-tap” strike, with the two Iskander-M missiles deliberately launched 10 minutes apart in order to injure first responders arriving at the scene.

“The Russians sometimes suggest that their missiles that kill civilians have gone off course,” he said. “But they boast how the Iskander missiles they used today are very accurate. Two came to the same spot.

“There are no military sites around here and everyone at this resort was a civilian. Not one soldier... people who had come with their children because they thought they could escape, for a few hours on a Sunday, the dangers of daily aerial strikes against the city [Kharkiv].”

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The second missile lightly injured a medic and a police officer and damaged their ambulance and police car.

Also on Sunday, Russian aerial strikes from glide bombs, missiles and drones killed five people and injured at least eight in villages east of Kharkiv city. In Kharkiv itself, airstrikes on a public park where children were playing, and on the city’s cemetery, injured two people. The death toll among civilians over the weekend was so high that it prompted the Kharkiv region authorities to declare Monday a day of mourning.

President Volodymyr Zelensky and his military commanders and foreign supporters of Ukraine have condemned the restrictions that America and others have placed on weapons, preventing those that have been transferred to Ukraine from being used against targets in Russia itself. There are fears it could drag Nato into direct conflict with Russia. But Ukrainian officials believe they need to defend the country any way they can.

Mr Zelensky repeated, in an interview with Reuters, calls for the US to lift the limitations by America and other allies on the use of their weapons inside Russia. Although the president said he understood those fears, he urged an even bolder approach by Ukraine’s allies to use their planes to protect the skies while Ukraine waits for promised F-16 fighter jets.

Ukraine has said it is holding Russia back for now but military and intelligence chiefs have warned that with no fear of retaliation using US weapons, Russia will continue to strike from beyond the border to back up further advances.

Kyiv says up to 10,000 soldiers, including units from Chechnya, and three motorised rifle regiments are gathering across the border from Ukraine’s Sumy region – about 100 miles north of Kharkiv.

“It’s a question of will,” Mr Zelensky said. “But everyone says a word that sounds the same in every language: everyone is scared of escalation. Everyone has gotten used to the fact that Ukrainians are dying – that’s not escalation for people.”