Blood and dust: The rise of Russia’s glide bombs

Born out of necessity in 2023 as Russian forces struggled with ammunition shortages, and overcoming Ukraine’s air defences, UMPK glide and guidance kits have transformed Russia’s stockpile of unguided ordnance into a game-changer within the positional war.

A lot had happened in the Ukraine war by March 2023. Ukraine’s counter-attacks in Kherson and Kharkiv in late 2022 had rolled unsuspecting and poorly protected Russian forces up, returning hundreds of square kilometres to Ukraine’s control. Russia meanwhile was scrabbling to consolidate its forces and fix mistakes made in the initial build-up and operation. The Kremlin had decided not to mobilise for the initial invasion, believing – or perhaps hoping – that the peacetime strength would be enough to break Ukraine. It was of course wrong, and its units were now suffering without the infantry that mobilisation was supposed to provide. A quiet mobilisation then started, bringing volunteers and convicts to the theatre, often without any meaningful training.

This influx of bodies stabilised the Russian lines and allowed them to renew offensive action in the winter of 2022–2023, as well as preparing for the anticipated Ukrainian counter-offensive in the summer of 2023. By early 2023, Russian forces were trying to recover from their failed winter offensives, which had led to smaller and smaller unit sizes, against well-prepared and well-equipped Ukrainian positions. At the same time, the majority of the core force was deployed, with Russia’s remaining training establishment unsuitable for the tens of thousands of mobilised personnel and convicts that were passing through Ukraine.

Already, Russian forces were beginning to run low on artillery ammunition, having spent up to 50,000 rounds per day at certain points of the conflict. This was a big problem. Russian tactics heavily on drills, mechanised units deploying in a somewhat predetermined fashion with an extensive artillery preparation beforehand. The massed firepower was essential, as it suppressed and cowed the enemy, minimising their ability to respond and fight back effectively. Without it, Russian units would struggle, and sometimes even refuse to advance. Russia was eating into its strategic stockpiles and its defence industry, much like Europe’s, was then not up to the task of rapidly increasing production. Moreover, Ukraine had taken delivery of its first M142 HIMARS in the summer of 2022 and promptly started targeting Russia’s logistics nodes and ammunition depots, leading to the loss of thousands of tonnes of ammunition, and forcing its dispersion. This made it more difficult for Russian artillery to resource its fire missions.

Artillery ammunition was not the only problem facing Russia. Its air force, the VKS, was struggling to make a meaningful contribution. Lacking precision-guided munitions for close air support and operating in contested airspace, it was confined to low flights launching rockets and the occasional release of unguided bombs. However, as Ukraine began to receive greater numbers of air defence systems and interceptors, the airspace became more dangerous for Russia’s aircraft. Man portable air defence systems (MANPADS) had claimed many Russian Su-25SM and Su-24M strike aircraft throughout Ukraine. Initial PATRIOT deliveries complemented Ukraine’s existing Soviet systems, and claimed their first kills in May, shooting down an Su-35 fighter, Su-34 multirole bomber and two Mi-8 helicopters in a single engagement in the Bryansk region.

 

Here, all of Moscow’s challenges converged. Russia has historically used airpower combined with artillery in extensive and brutal close support bombardments that are designed to preserve life and combat power within the ground forces. During the Second Chechen war, the Russian air force flew 2,160 combat sorties in the two weeks following the start of ground operations on 17 January 2000, with 250 conducted on the 24 January, alone. They targeted Chechen strongpoints, vehicles and the cell phone towers that they used for communication.

“Under relentless bombardment from artillery and air strikes, isolated from outside support, and unable to communicate effectively, Chechen leaders ordered a general withdrawal from Grozny on 1 February 2000,” a paper published by a US Air Force (USAF) student studying the war, stated.[1] This was probably the desired result for Russia’s ground forces. The second Chechen war started in late 1999, with disastrous casualties of the first war from 1994–1996 fresh in the Russian mind. Putin and his military team had made clear that those mistakes would not be repeated and the lives of Russian soldiers would be preserved. In the end, this occurred at the expense of Chechen civilians. Chechnya established a pattern that would be repeated in Ukraine in 2015 and Syria. Any strong point or settlement would be encircled to the greatest possible extent, with artillery and airpower brought in to prepare the way for the ground troops.

So, as Russian forces found their feet in 2023, ammunition was lacking, and Ukraine’s ability to push Russian airpower away from the front was increasing. Amidst all of this, a new weapon emerged, the dumb bomb fitted with a guidance and glide kit, dramatically improving the range and lethality of these weapons while allowing the VKS to operate mostly beyond the reach of Ukraine’s air defence systems.

Forged in the dust of Avdiivka

This photo is understood to be of a building in Avdiivka taken during the battle for the city where Russian glide bomb use averaged 80 strikes a day. The bombs are very effective at destroying buildings and neutralising Ukrainian strong points. [National Police of Ukraine]

The earliest mention of Russian glide bombs appears to have come from pro-Russian Telegram accounts, which mentioned a form of guided bomb in early 2023. Their use was confirmed by Yuriy Ignat, spokesman for the Ukrainian Air Force during a televised briefing in March 2023. He told the nation: “Russian aviation carries out dozens of air strikes every day and has begun to use winged, guided aerial bombs, in fact, they appear in the frontline zone every day. This is a new threat that has arisen before us: without flying into the effective zone of our air defence, they drop these bombs. 500 kg bombs fly tens of kilometres…something needs to be done about this.”[2]

 

The early UMPKs (Унифицированный модуль планирования и коррекции; ENG: Unified gliding and correction module) were fitted to FAB-500 and FAB-250 dumb bombs, weighing 500 kg and 250 kg respectively. These general purpose bombs had been manufactured by the Soviet Union, and it is likely that Russia entered the Ukraine war with stocks in the thousands. The addition of the UMPK turned them into a more accurate weapon, but it would take time for Russian forces to develop their full potential. They were used to halt and defeat Ukraine’s offensive forces in the summer of 2023, with mines and loitering munitions used to bring a formation to a stop, before bombs fitted with UMPK kits, artillery, attack helicopters and loitering munitions completed their defeat. By the start of the offensive on Avdiivka in October 2023, however, there were still challenges with the use of glide bombs. “Glide bomb strikes remained inaccurate forms of bombardment and were not well integrated into ground operations. This was not a form of close air support…but by themselves they did not offer a decisive advantage,” Michael Kofman of the Carnegie Endowment wrote on Russia’s Avdiivka operation in 2024.[3]

As Kofman also notes, this changed over time, with glide bomb strikes becoming progressively more accurate and effective. And by February 2024, “a shortage of combat capable infantry, combined with shell hunger, and an inability to counter Russian air strikes ultimately forced Ukrainian units to retreat,” Kofman explains. They have, in essence, enabled Russian commanders to come closer to replicating the massed firepower that they are taught to deploy. Some of the bombs, which will be discussed below, can have a gliding range of 80 km, allowing the VKS to safely deploy them well out of reach of Ukraine’s air defence envelope. They can also be manufactured at true scale, using global navigation satellite system (GNSS) guidance based on the Kometa-M jamming- and spoofing-resistant antenna – which is used in the Geran one way attack drones as well as Russian cruise missiles – and a fairly simple deployable glide wing construction.[4] This allows the strategic stockpile of dumb bombs to be converted into a weapon that can meaningfully contribute to the country’s war effort at a relatively low cost.

As has been the case for other new Russian weapons such as Lancet family loitering munitions, the rate of UMPK use increased steadily over time. By March 2024, Russia had deployed 3,500 glide bombs against Ukrainian positions, reaching a peak of 250 in two days against Avdiivka, and an average of 100 per day through September. The glide bombs posed a dilemma for Ukrainian forces during defensive operations. Typically, Russian units would fix them in place by conducting probing attacks with small infantry sections and occasionally armoured vehicles supported by artillery and first-person view (FPV) drones. Without defending these positions, Ukraine would risk losing territory, but by holding them, they present themselves as a target for glide bombs.

Blood and vomit

In the Serebryansky forest, close to the Ukrainian towns of Slovyansk and Lyman, Drongo was driving an armoured vehicle down a makeshift road when a guided bomb landed nearby in 2024. Drongo was part of the 1st Presidential Storm Brigade and had served in the Ukrainian armed forces for a decade. “You can feel your organs shaking around inside you…I started bleeding from my ears and nose. Vomiting. I was really struggling to speak for two days from the concussion,” he told a reporter for The Times in March 2024.

This touches on an important element of the glide bomb; concussions, something that has become a major risk to Ukrainian units. Glide bombs weighing 500 kg or 1,500 kg are used most often, and carry enough explosive material to make a crater 15 m across. Some larger bombs weigh 3,000 kg with at least 1,000 kg of high explosives, and can level a building with a single strike.[5] However, they will often land outside of the building, maybe 50 m away from their intended target. In that case, it may not even kill the Ukrainians defending the building, but they are very likely to have a concussion and contusions (bruising) if they are not otherwise wounded or killed. This became a serious issue for Ukrainian forces, with concussion-related casualties causing the loss of entire units in some cases.

Initially, and to some extent now, the glide bombs were not particularly accurate, but unlike artillery and drones, there is nothing Ukrainians can really do to defend against them. “These bombs completely destroy any position. All buildings and structures simply turn into a pit after the arrival of just one,” the commander of Ukraine’s 3rd Brigade posted on Telegram in 2024.[6] Avdiivka was hit by 60 to 80 glide bombs every day, he added. The inability to intercept them and the bombers, as well as the destructive power led to a sense of hopelessness amongst Ukrainian troops, which increased as the bombs became more accurate.

 

In the early phases of the UMPK paradigm, Russian pilots would try to release them at their maximum range of circa 40-60 km, giving them time to escape any return fire. However, to achieve such ranges, Russian pilots had to climb to altitudes as high as 12,000 m, which exposed them to Ukrainian air defence systems.[7] In this role, they have been shown regularly striking buildings, and are even reportedly capable of hitting gun hides and similar positions on the frontline, a RUSI paper from early 2025 notes.[8]

Reasonable sufficiency

Russian equipment is often regarded as inferior to Western equivalents, and that is sometimes by design. For munitions, it might be sufficient to have a reasonably accurate bomb, but very large, allowing the explosives to account for the lack of accuracy. The bomb that hit Drongo referenced earlier was unlikely to have been meant for him, but the blast was so large that it took him and his vehicle out. The Russian military may refer to this concept as ‘reasonable sufficiency’; the weapon is sufficiently accurate for what they need, and there is no real drive for anything more. The glide bombs are the epitome of reasonable sufficiency, a simple design that gets a very significant payload close enough to a target to have the desired effect.

The technology behind UMPKs is fairly straightforward; it is a machined metal body with two fold-out wings. In some versions that have been disassembled, a small pyrotechnic device is included to release the wings, and with servos providing rotation for the steering surfaces in the tail. Occasionally a cap will be fitted to the bomb itself to improve its aerodynamic efficiency, reducing the drag generated by the bomb. The UMPK’s metal body is clamped to the bomb and includes a Kometa-M series GNSS guidance module.

The Kometa-M series originally featured a four-element antenna, however with improvements to Ukrainian jamming and spoofing techniques, this became less effective, so over time the number of channels increased to eight and then 12, and even 16 elements.[9] These additional elements improved the ability of the UMPK – and by extension all Russian munitions that use Kometa – to distinguish more accurately between the bomb’s actual positioning, real and fake signals.
[Editor’s note: According to conversations I have had with Ukrainian electronic warfare experts, Russia’s trend of simply increasing the number of elements on Kometa-M series antennas reversed in Spring 2025, with Russia going back to four-element and eight-element antenna designs. The Ukrainians explained that this was due to the introduction of much more efficient processing algorithms within the new-generation Kometa-M series, which greatly improved jamming and spoofing resistance, and in turn allowed the cheaper and more cost-effective four- and eight-element antennas to become viable again.]

A gyroscope is installed under the Kometa module, according to at least one system that has been disassembled by a Ukrainian blogger.[10] This likely provides some measurements on the positioning and change in direction of the bomb during flight. All of these elements, appear to be connected to a control unit, which is loaded with the target coordinates prior to release, possibly by the carrier jet. A pair of rechargeable batteries provide power for all electronic elements throughout its flight.

The UMPK kit is attached upside down to a gravity bomb carried on the underwing pylons of a suitable aircraft. Commonly, the FAB-500 M-62 bomb has been used in this role, though lighter or heavier bombs have also been used, the latter providing greater payload but reduced numbers of munitions per sortie. The standard platform for their use is the Su-34, a multirole bomber with a side-by-side crew seating arrangement within a Titanium alloy armoured cockpit.[11] It has a maximum take-off weight (MTOW) of 44,100 kg and is able to carry 8,000 kg of weapons distributed across 12 hardpoints, which allows for up to three FAB-1500s to be carried. The Su-34 has a top speed of 1,900 km/h and a service ceiling of 14,000 m.

 

Su-34s will often be deployed in pairs, providing several FABs with UMPKs in a single sortie. They are also frequently accompanied by a combat air patrol of Su-35s armed with air-to-air and anti-radiation missiles. This enables the aircraft to engage Ukrainian air defence systems in the event that they attempt an engagement. Once the bombs have been released, the pilot will turn the plane away and exit the area as quickly as possible – despite the presence of Su-35s and range of the UMPKs, they have still proven vulnerable to Ukrainian air defence ambushes.

Although the FAB-500 appears to be the most common, there are various sizes of bombs used with UMPK kits, as detailed below:

• FAB-250: Explosive weight of 100 kg and is dangerous to personnel out to 120 m.
• FAB-500: Explosive weight of 200 kg, reportedly provides a 100% kill probability to people within 10 m and high chance of wounding out to 40 m, and dangerous to personnel out to 250 m.
• ODAB-500: Filled with a thermobaric explosive referred to as OM-100MI-3L.
• FAB-1500: Explosive weight of 670 kg and a destructive area of at least 100 m. Able to penetrate 3 m of reinforced concrete and destroy bunkers up to 20 m underground.[12]
• FAB-3000: Explosive weight of 1,200 kg with a destructive area of at least 230 m. The fragments are claimed to carry enough energy to wound out to a range of 1,200 m.

Su-34s are often shown carrying and releasing four FAB-500s with UMPKs, and there is mounting evidence to suggest that all four can and will be deployed against a single given target. This might be a building or area in which Ukrainian forces are operating. The bombs will often arrive within seconds of each other and close enough together that their lethal effects overlap.

Reconnaissance for the glide bombs is key – you cannot target something precisely without high quality reconnaissance and an accurate target location. A good portion of Russian targeting is now carried out using UAVs, likely the larger types such as the Orlan-30 and Z-16, which are equipped with laser designators that should be capable of generating sufficiently accurate grid references. Also, the Leer-3 electronic warfare system, which is designed to detect and geolocate cell phone signals, has been used to locate Ukrainian troops and call for glide bomb strikes. “The targeting cycle with EW systems is usually much longer than with visual forms of detection, but it nonetheless poses a significant risk to troops on the battlefield, especially if they are clustered near the front line and emitting,” Kofman wrote in his 2024 paper on Russian adaptation.

May 2025 also saw the first reported use of extended-range UMPKs, designated UMPK-PD. Four UMPK-PDs were used in the Kharkiv region, which had been released from around 95 km away, head of the Kharkiv Regional Prosecutor’s Office, Spartak Borysenko, said on 2 June 2025.[13] He speculated that the bombs were only being tested and that the range could be even greater than 100 km. Kharkiv has been subject to regular glide bomb attacks using a variety of the existing types up to FAB-3000s; however, these would all bring Russian jets closer to Ukraine’s airspace, increasing the risk of interception. The UMPK-PD could enable more bombs to be released without Russian jets exposing themselves, or they could strike at targets deeper to Ukraine’s rear.

 

The recovered UMPK-PD wreckage indicated that the wings were longer and more substantial, which would improve the lift-to-drag ratio. The connection to the bomb and internal control mechanisms were also more substantial, and likely combined with the latest Kometa series guidance module. The bombs may also have been used in the Sumy region, and were deployed from a Su-34 at a height of 9,000 m, Borysenko added. They reached speeds of 700–800 km/h, which would provide a flight time of roughly 7.5 to 8.5 minutes at a range of 100 km. This would drastically shorten the warning time available to Ukrainians civilians, and make moving to a bomb shelter a must in the event of Su-34 flights. For Ukrainian soldiers, it would mean that Russia could strike at targets further to the Ukrainian rear without pushing their aircraft closer to the frontlines. This is increasingly an area of focus for both forces as they work to interdict and degrade the logistics routes that keep the frontlines supplied.

A game of cat and mouse

Russia has ordered 75,000 UMPKs for 2025, according to RUSI. The use and impact of these bombs will no doubt continue and accelerate. It is unlikely that Ukraine will be able to effectively counter them with its air defence systems as interceptors are limited, and the systems themselves prioritise defending the rear echelons and critical national infrastructure. Typically, the Russian jets are too far behind the lines for air-to-air interceptions, and the increased range of the UMPK-PD will only make this task more difficult. Jamming and spoofing does seem to have had an effect on glide bomb efficacy, although electronic warfare has only ever had a temporary impact, and must be constantly updated to keep pace with changes in technology. Ukraine has also started to make greater use of the Western glide bombs it has, striking Russian units in Sumy and Belgorod as they prepare for their anticipated offensives. As is the case for many of the weapons used in Ukraine, it is a game of cat and mouse, and, as one Ukrainian Chief Technology Officer (CTO) recently told me, “sometimes you are the cat, and sometimes you are the mouse.”

Sam Cranny-Evans

Sam Cranny-Evans is a consultant and journalist based in the UK. He specialises in land warfare and the technologies shaping the way armed forces fight. Sam previously worked at Janes and is a RUSI associate fellow.

[1] https://cgsc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/api/collection/p4013coll3/id/251/download#:~:text=Aside%20from%20the%20very%20brief,airpower%20extensively%2C%20with%20mixed%20results.

[2] https://www.ukrinform.ua/rubric-ato/3689344-ignat-rozpoviv-pro-novu-zagrozu-aviacia-rf-sodna-skidae-desatki-bomb-u-prifrontovij-zoni.html

[3] https://carnegie-production-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/static/files/Kofman-Russia-final-2.pdf

[4] https://www.twz.com/the-truth-about-russias-mysterious-winged-glide-bombs

[5] https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2024/07/19/what-we-know-about-russias-new-3-ton-glide-bomb/

[6] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/03/11/russia-glide-bombs-air-force-avdiivka/

[7] https://militarnyi.com/uk/articles/rosiya-vtratyla-perevagu-kabiv-na-poli-boyu-ale-chy-tak-tse-naspravdi/

[8] https://static.rusi.org/tactical-developments-third-year-russo-ukrainian-war-february-2205.pdf

[9] https://www.forbes.com/sites/vikrammittal/2025/03/18/russian-glide-bombs-upgraded-with-advanced-counter-jamming-system/

[10] https://en.defence-ua.com/weapon_and_tech/umpk_dismantled_and_analyzed_whats_inside_the_russian_kit_turning_dumb_fab_into_a_guided_bomb_video-12219.html

[11] https://www.calibredefence.co.uk/united-aircraft-corporation-completes-fourth-su-34-delivery-of-2024/

[12] https://lenta.ru/articles/2025/01/10/fab-500-fab-1500/

[13] https://suspilne.media/kharkiv/1032987-pid-cas-udariv-po-harkivsini-rf-pocala-viprobovuvati-novij-modul-planeruvanna-so-dozvolae-aviabombam-letiti-dali/