Russian forces are reportedly using gliding vacuum bombs in the battle for Volchansk, a city in northern Ukraine’s Kharkov Region.
War correspondent, Andrey Rudenko, has shared footage purportedly showing ODAB-1500 munitions being deployed on Sunday and Monday, but the Russian Defense Ministry has neither confirmed nor denied the move.
The ODAB-1500 is the largest of the so-called thermobaric air bombs, also known as vacuum bombs, available to the Russian military. These weapons disperse their explosive payload as an aerosol before triggering a massive fireball. They are designed to inflict damage to troops hiding in fortified positions in the field.
The Russian Defense Ministry last reported using an ODAB-1500 in September near the city of Kupyansk, some 80km southeast of Volchansk.
Kupyansk is located close to the border with Russia’s Belgorod Region. Moscow launched an operation in the area in May, saying it needed to push Ukrainian troops away to curb drone and artillery strikes on the city of Belgorod and other Russian towns. Russian troops have reportedly made some advances in the battle for Volchansk recently.
Last week, a video was published online claiming to show the deployment of an ODAB-9000 in Volchansk, an even larger version of the same type of munition.
A senior Russian military official claimed in 2007 that the country had successfully tested the weapon and that it was nicknamed the ‘Father of All Bombs’ – a reference to the US GBU-43/B MOAB, known as the ‘Mother of All Bombs’. There was no record of such a weapon ever entering service in Russia, and subsequent reports denied that one had been used in the Ukraine conflict.
Russia has been developing glide upgrade kits for old Soviet bombs, which turn the ‘dumb’ airdropped weapons into longer-range precision munitions. The Defense Ministry showcased the deployment of a gliding high-explosive FAB-3000 bomb by a Su-34 fighter-bomber aircraft in July.