Russia's glide bombs devastating Ukraine's cities on the cheap

Russia is increasingly using "glide bombs" - cheap but highly destructive ordnance - to advance its offensive in Ukraine.

                               Vovchansk has been bombarded repeatedly in Russia's cross-border offensive

More than 200 of them are thought to have been used in just a week to pound Ukraine’s northern town of Vovchansk during Russia’s current cross-border advance near Kharkiv.

Warning: You may find some of the details in this piece disturbing

President Volodymyr Zaleski said 3,000 such bombs were dropped on the country in March alone.

Vovchansk police chief Oleksiak Kharkivsky has seen the impact of glide bombs up close.

                                                     Glide bombs can be dropped by Russia's Su-34 fighter jets

“There are no words to describe the aftermath of a glide bomb attack," he says. "You arrive to see people who are lying there, torn apart.”

The mass use of glide bombs by Russia is a relatively recent development, one that has proven devastating for Ukrainian forces in recent months.

Glide bombs are built by adding fold-out wings and satellite navigation to old Soviet bombs. They are cheap but destructive.

A recent report by the Centre for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) said they were decisive in February’s capture of the once heavily fortified key eastern town of Advika.

Russian forces are now using glide bombs to attack the northern city of Kharkiv. Ukraine has so far struggled to counter them.

                          Kharkiv has come under relentless attack from Russian glide bombs in recent weeks

The Vovchansk police chief has been helping to evacuate front-line border villages in the Kharkiv region, where Russian forces have recently been advancing.

Parked up in his police car, he tells us the scale of attacks has increased dramatically.

“Over the past six months, we were hit by glide bombs quite often, maybe five to 10 bombs per week… but this month we’ve had far more than ever," he said.

Russia is able to stockpile glide bombs in high quantities because they are quite easily produced.

“The explosive part is essentially a conventional freefall iron bomb, of which Russia has hundreds of thousands in storage from the Soviet period,” says Prof Justin Bonk, airpower and military technology specialist at the Royal United Services Institute (Ruisi).

“They are fitted with pop-out wings which, after the bomb is dropped, will flick out to allow it to glide much longer distances.”

Their attached satellite guidance system allows targeting of a stationary position with relatively high accuracy.

According to Prof Bonk, the mechanism of the bombs gives the Russians much of the functionality of a multi-million dollar missile, but for a fraction of the cost.

He says that glide kits - which are mass-produced and pretty mechanically simple - are added to Soviet bombs, of which the Russians have a plentiful supply - meaning the cost per weapon can be "somewhere in the region of $20,000 to $30,000 (£15,700-£23,600)".

The concept is not new. The Germans deployed the Fritz-X during World War Two. In the 1990s the US military developed the Joint Attack Direct Munition, or JDAM, which added steerable tail fins and GPS guidance to traditional free-fall bombs. They have been used extensively since, including in Iraq and Afghanistan