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Today, the biggest news is coming from Saint Petersburg city.
Here, newly found accuracy in Ukrainian strikes is going to force Putin to abandon his country’s second capital in the north, as its air defenses are coming under the same intensity of strikes as Russian systems on the frontline itself.
Notably during Ukraine’s last strike on Saint Petersburg and Ust Luga oil export facilities on the coast, a significant number of other targets had been struck as well. In addition to the oil terminals and storage tanks, a Russian missile ship was damaged by a direct strike, as well as two Russian helicopters and a Mig-thirty-one jet fighter being downed by friendly fire. Perhaps most crucial however, Ukrainians destroyed three of the largest radar complexes around the city.
Very quickly, military analysts noted how the damage on these radar stations was so precise, it could have only been achieved by a drone controlled in real time. Long-range Ukrainian drone strikes are almost always done through pre-programmed flight paths, with the path being able to be broadly modified from controllers in Ukraine. Real-time adjustment however, means that the Ukrainian operators controlling the drone are watching a live video feed and directly steering the drone onto a target, allowing them to be much more precise. Ukraine does not have access to this kind of uninterrupted communication at distances over a thousand kilometers from Ukraine.
A big explanation for how this strike was still conducted is that Starlink’s coverage is not blocked to the exact administrative Russian border; often extending up to thirty or more kilometers inland.As Finland, Estonia, and even the Baltic Sea itself experience full Starlink connectivity, it his highly likely that Ukrainians were able to coast off of this connection to maintain complete control of their drones, and guide them to their targets with unmatched precision. This means that Ukraine has just found a loophole to make even their deep-rear strikes as accurate as their frontline and mid-range strikes.
The implications of this are immense. Due to the accuracy of Ukrainian strikes in the frontline area, Russia has lost over one-thousand-seven-hundred air defense systems throughout the war. September saw an especially notable number of eighty-six confirmed destructions in a single month. This is why Russia often maintains an extremely dispersed stance and moved many of its strongest systems further back, to prevent losses from becoming too unbearable.
Now that Ukrainians are effectively able to expand this level of precision all along the Russian border and coastline, Russians are faced with an extreme problem. Now Ukrainians do not need to saturate and overwhelm Russian air defenses in these areas through massive numbers, but they can simply engage these defenses outright and force open a gap for follow-up strikes to make it through.
In this case, Russian export hubs in Saint Petersburg and the Leningrad coastline were only the beginning; a test to see if it would work. In the future, we could see Ukrainians capitalizing on this method to strike major air and military bases in Voronezh, Belgorod, Kursk, Rostov, or even Krasnodar Krai; destroying the air defenses meant to protect the approaches to these critical military assets. In turn, as these pricey systems become more of a target, Russians will be forced once again to move their air defenses away. This time not just away from Ukraine itself, but from the entire Russian border area, lest they become irreplaceable losses very soon. Essentially this will result in Russians being forced to fight Ukrainian drones and protect their most valuable military and economic assets from a distance, greatly reducing their efficiency and enhancing the impact of Ukrainian deep-strikes.
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