Russian Jet Accidentally Bombs Russia-OOPS
OOPS! :(
RIGA, Latvia — A Russian warplane accidentally dropped a bomb on a Russian city near the Ukrainian border late Thursday, injuring three people and creating a massive crater on the street — the latest mishap in Moscow’s brutal war against its neighbor.
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The Russian Defense Ministry acknowledged it was friendly fire, saying overnight that a Su-34 supersonic fighter jet had accidentally discharged a munition.
“As a Sukhoi Su-34 air force plane was flying over the city of Belgorod, there was an accidental discharge of aviation ammunition,” the ministry said, according to Tass state news agency.
Videos from the scene showed piles of twisted metal and chunks of concrete splattered on the street, several damaged cars, and apartment buildings with blown-out windows and destroyed walls.
A 65-foot-wide crater was left after a Russian warplane dropped a bomb inadvertently on the city of Belgorod, Russia. (Telegram channel of Belgorod Gov. Vyacheslav Gladkov/AP)
The blast was apparently so strong that a parked car flipped into the air and landed on the roof of a one-story shop, local media reported. The vehicle was removed on Friday morning using a construction crane.
“The residents of Belgorod were faced with tough ordeals last night,” said Belgorod’s governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov. “Together, I think we will go through them,” Gladkov announced a state of emergency overnight and said the crater measured 65 feet.
According to Gladkov, one nearby apartment block was fully evacuated to allow for repairs.
Antiwar Russians quickly took to social media to proclaim the incident a real-life example of a popular Russian meme — “bomb Voronezh” — a city in southern Russia. The meme speaks to the Kremlin’s tendency to oppose or try to harm the West with measures that end up hurting its own citizens instead — a Russian version of cutting off your nose to spite your face.
The real-life bombing of Belgorod, in which a powerful munition was accidentally “dropped,” like an egg on a kitchen floor, showed the futility of President Vladimir Putin’s effort to prevent his citizens from noticing what he calls the “special military operation” in Ukraine.
According to Western intelligence and Russian military documents, Putin had intended for his invasion to be a blitzkrieg operation leading to the capture of Kyiv. Instead, it has become a grinding war of attrition with no end in sight.
It was not clear what type of weapon exploded in central Belgorod. Some military analysts suggested it could have been a UMPK FAB-500M62 glide bomb whose wings failed to initiate.
“The FAB exploded as normal; the fuse was set on a delay, so apparently the target was something underground: bunkers, cellars, workshops and the like,” a prominent Russian military blogger, who uses the Fighterbomber handle, wrote on the Telegram messaging app. “Belgorod got lucky today.”
“It would all have been fine except for the chosen flight path over the city, which at night glows like a huge lantern and it’s impossible not to see it,” Fighterbomber added. “You can’t make mistakes like that, this should never ever happen again.”
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Earlier this month, Ukraine issued a warning saying that Russia had introduced guided bombs into its arsenal, such as a modified FAB-500 bomb, which it has used, for example, to target Ukrainian defenses in Avdiivka in the Donetsk region.
The FAB-500 is a 500 kilogram (1,100 pounds) Soviet-made general-purpose bomb, with a highly-explosive warhead.
Yurii Ihnat, the spokesman for the Air Force of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, said recently that the Russian military has been using these bombs “from a distance that is unreachable for Ukrainian air defense,” according to Ukrainska Pravda, a Ukrainian news site.
Ihnat added that Russia may be increasing the production of these bombs, which will be outfitted with wings and GPS navigation.
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It is unclear why Russia has only recently adopted this method of turning simple bombs into guided ones. But it allows Moscow a way to replenish its significantly depleted stockpiles of cruise and ballistic missiles with a relatively cheap and effective weapon while also filling some gaps in air support for its ground troops in Ukraine.
“More often, the enemy uses guided air bombs weighing 500 kg along the entire front line. There are signs of preparation for the mass use of 1,500 kg KABs,” Mykola Oleshchuk, the commander of the Air Force of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, wrote in a Telegram post. “The planes of the Russians do not enter the zone of damage of our air defense, striking remotely at the front line and near-frontline cities.”
The Belgorod region, with its capital city just a few miles away from the Ukrainian border, has served as one of the key staging grounds for Russian troops since Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine more than a year ago.
It is one of the areas where the reality of the war is felt most acutely by regular Russians, as some towns have had to be evacuated to safety. Shelling, casualties, ammunition and oil depot fires, and drone strikes have become a daily routine.
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