Ukraine hit another Russian ammunition depot in a deep strike on an airfield

• Ukraine said it struck a Russian military airfield overnight, marking its latest deep strike.
• On Wednesday, Ukrainian forces attacked an ammunition depot and a drone depot.
• Kiev continues to have success with long-range targeting inside Russia.

Ukrainian forces struck an ammunition depot at a Russian military airfield overnight, the latest in a string of long-range attacks targeting Moscow’s war machine.

In the past two days, the Ukrainian military has said it has damaged a key Russian ammunition depot, a drone storage facility and now another ammunition depot at an airfield.

The back-to-back strikes underscore Ukraine’s reach and demonstrate the repeated inability of Russia’s air defenses to protect its military installations, including during the latest attack.

The Ukrainian military said on Thursday that, in the latest strike in Russia since the previous night, it had attacked the Khanskaya airfield, located in the southwestern Republic of Adygea. Ukraine said it hit an ammunition depot at the site and caused “fire damage” to the airfield, which was home to Su-34 and Su-27 warplanes. It is not clear if the attack affected any aircraft.

Russia’s Su-34 fighter-bombers have been particularly problematic for Kiev, as these aircraft can drop highly destructive glide bombs to devastating effect.

Glide bombs, jamming weapons, are notoriously difficult to intercept. Ukraine can defeat this threat only by targeting munitions and warplanes from their bases, which Kiev has done several times in recent months. It is unclear whether the most recent ammunition depot stocked these weapons.

The Khanskaya attack followed two other Ukrainian strikes deep into Russian territory.

On Wednesday, Ukraine said it used drones to strike a munitions depot in Russia’s Bryansk region, where cruise bombs, missiles and artillery shells – including weapons from North Korea and Iran – were stored.

Ukraine has targeted several Russian ammunition depots since mid-September. Kiev has relied on domestically produced long-range drones for these operations because it is not allowed to use its inventory of Western-supplied cruise and ballistic missiles to strike inside Russia.

Hours after the Bryansk operation, Ukraine said it had destroyed a base in Russia’s Krasnodar region that housed about 400 Shahed-136 one-way attack drones. Some open-source intelligence accounts speculated that Kiev carried out the attack using home-made R-360 Neptune cruise missiles, anti-ship weapons that have been modified for land attacks.

Western officials, Ukrainian armed forces and war analysts said Kiev’s deep-strike campaign could complicate Russian operations inside Ukraine.

“In terms of long-range strikes, we have seen some successful strikes by Ukrainian one-way attack drones against Russian ammunition storage sites,” a senior US military official told reporters on Wednesday. “We also saw some strikes against fuel facilities in Crimea. We believe they will have some impact on the battlefield.”

The official said the effects are not immediate and explained that it takes time to be seen on the battlefield.

Conflict analysts at the Institute for the Study of War said continued Ukrainian attacks against Russian military installations will put more operational pressure on Moscow’s forces.

This development will force “the Russian military command to reorganize and disperse support and logistics systems in Russia to mitigate the impact of such strikes,” analysts wrote in an assessment on Wednesday.