Ukraine has increasingly targeted Russia's nuclear ballistic missile early warning radar network, with three facilities struck by Ukrainian drones in the past two months.
Two of these strikes occurred within the last week. On May 22, a drone hit a "Voronezh-DM" radar at the Armavir Radar Station in southern Krasnodar, damaging a building housing one of the two radars, which have a range of around 6,000 kilometers (3,730 miles). This site is more than 300 miles from the nearest Ukrainian-controlled territory.
A more ambitious attack followed on May 26, when a Ukrainian drone traveled about 930 miles from Kyiv-controlled territory to target a Voronezh-M radar near Orsk in the Orenburg region, close to Kazakhstan's border. The extent of damage at the Orsk site is unclear, but this strike may be Ukraine's longest-range drone attack to date, as Kyiv increasingly targets Russia's long-range radar and oil facilities.
The Kyiv Independent cited an anonymous military intelligence source stating the drone in the May 26 attack flew 1,118 miles, surpassing the 930 miles claimed in a recent strike on an oil plant in Russia's Bashkiria region.
Reuters confirmed the dual drone strikes through an unnamed Ukrainian intelligence source, who explained that Russia's long-range radars are targeted because they monitor Ukrainian security and defense forces in southern Ukraine.
Ukraine began its campaign against Russia's early warning radar network in April, starting with drone strikes on the 590th separate radio engineering center of military unit 84680 in Kovylkino, Mordovia Republic, about 360 miles from the Ukrainian border. This site hosts a 29B6 "Container" over-the-horizon radar, part of Russia's aerospace reconnaissance and early-warning network for ballistic missile attacks. The Voronezh-M radar sites in Armavir and Orsk also serve this purpose.
Russia has at least five other radar sites with Voronezh-M systems. Two are in western Russia, at the Lekhtusi Radar Station near St. Petersburg and the Pionersky Radar Station in the Kaliningrad exclave. Three are in Siberia, at the Mishelevka Radar Station near Irkutsk, near Yeniseysk in the Krasnoyarsk Krai region, and near Barnaul in the Altai Krai region.
Additional Voronezh-M radar stations are planned near Sevastopol in occupied Crimea, Olenogorsk in the Murmansk region near the Arctic Circle, and Vorkuta in the northern Komi Republic, also in the Arctic region.
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