On Monday, military aerodromes were the target of attacks, visibly by TU-141, drones of recognition of Soviet origin transformed into cruise missiles. A “danger factor”, admitted the spokesperson for the Kremlin.
by Pierre Bouvier
Riazan, Saratov then Koursk. Since Monday, December 5, several Russian military aerodromes have been the target of attacks attributed to the Ukrainians. In a press release, the ministry of Russian defense wrote , Monday, that “the kyiv regime tried to attack with Soviet manufacturing drones the military aerodromes of Diaguilevo, in the region of Riazan, and Engels, in the Saratov region, in order to put out of state to harm Russian long -range Russian planes “. These attacks left at least three dead and four wounded among the Russian soldiers.
The Engels-2 air base is in the Saratov Oblast (about 500 km from Ukrainian territory) and that of Diaguilevo is in the Riazan Oblast (about 460 km from Ukrainian territory). These two installations are home to Russian strategic bombers, TU-95 (turboprop) and TU-160 (supersonic) at Engels 2; TU-22M (supersonic) and TU-95 with Diaguilevo. Since the start of the war, these devices have been used by Moscow to launch cruise missiles to Ukraine.
The return of Tu-141
So far, most Ukrainian attacks on Russian bases have limited to targets close to Ukrainian borders. On February 25, the day after the Russian attack, a short -range ballistic missile was pulled against Millerovo aerodrome , in the Rostov region. In August, it was the HQ of the Black Sea fleet, in Sébastopol which was targeted with a suicide bomber drone. On Monday, the Russian newspaper kommersant wrote that the Ukraine had used Tu-141 to strike the base of Engels.
The Tu-141 “Strizh” (“Martinet”, in Russian) is not a stranger. 14 meters long, this machine has a scope of about 4 meters and weighs just over six tonnes: drawn from a trailer, it has an autonomy of around 1,000 km and flies at a speed of around 1,000 km /H, which seems compatible with videos posted on networks social . This Drone of recognition of Soviet origin has been transformed into a cruise missile by Ukraine, which is the only country to still have copies.
March 10, One of them flew over Romanian and Hungarian air spaces before crashing in Zagreb, in Croatia. In June, window The Croatian weekly Nacional wrote that the machine “belonged to the Ukrainian army and that it had a charge intended to explode on the Russian positions in Ukraine”. The 1 er December, the Croatian Minister of Defense, Mario Banozic , explained that the Croatian authorities knew who had launched it but that the information remained “confidential”.
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