There were explosions at two Russian military airbases on Monday, killing three people. Russia has accused Ukraine of being responsible, arguing that the explosions were caused by drones of the Ukrainian army that Russian defense systems intercepted and shot down, but whose debris still fell near the bases.
Ukraine has not officially commented on the Russian allegations yet, but a top Ukrainian government official confirmed them anonymously to the New York Times. The official also said that at least one of the attacks would have been carried out with the help of Ukrainian “special forces” close to the bases: it is not clear whether he was referring to Ukrainian infiltrators in Russian territory.
If this were really the case, although it is not the first attack by Ukraine on Russian territory, it would be a very important novelty in the war: the explosions in fact took place in two air bases very far from the border with Ukraine and from the war front where fighting the Russian and Ukrainian armies, that of Engels-2, in the region of Saratov, and that of Ryazan, the capital of the region of the same name. They are both about 500 km from the border with Ukraine as the crow flies, a distance that the weapons in possession of the Ukrainian army – as far as we know – are not able to cover to hit Russian targets.
In the absence of official confirmation or further verification, however, Russia’s allegations should be treated with some caution. What is certain is that Ukraine has been working for some time to create weapons capable of hitting targets hundreds of kilometers from the front, such as the drones in question. In October, Ukraine’s state-owned arms manufacturing company, Ukroboronprom, said it was working to build drones capable of carrying warheads weighing more than 70 kg and capable of flying about 1,000 km, and last week it added have completed the tests.
However, it should not be expected that the Ukrainian authorities will soon confirm that they have carried out the attack: already in recent months, when other attacks were carried out on Russian territory, Ukraine had avoided commenting on them officially, with the aim of leave suspended the suspicion that they may have been the work of Russian opponents of the government of Vladimir Putin. This had happened, for example, in the case of the explosion that on 8 October had collapsed part of the Crimean bridge and in the attack at the end of October on the headquarters of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, in the port of Sevastopol, also in Crimea.
On Monday, Mykhailo Podolyak, adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, commented on Twitter on the explosions at Russian air bases with a rather cryptic sentence, which, however, revealed a confirmation of Ukrainian responsibility: «The Earth is round, it is a discovery made by Galileo. In the Kremlin they did not study astronomy, and preferred court astrologers. If they had, they would know: if something is thrown into the airspace of other countries, sooner or later some flying object will return to its starting point.
Meanwhile, on Tuesday morning there was another explosion in a Russian military airport, this time in the city of Kursk, which however is closer to the Ukrainian border than the other two bases (about a hundred kilometers away). According to local authorities, this explosion was also caused by Ukrainian drones, which would have hit a fuel tank, causing a big fire.
Video showing the smoke https://t.co/fdUlCYMgyg pic.twitter.com/l2L2mBpDCB
— Aric Toler (@AricToler) December 6, 2022
