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RUSSIA UKRAINE TAKES WAR INTO RUSSIA The Military Show: Twin BLOW to Putin as Russian Airfield and Factory BURN BURN BURN PLAY YOUTUBE VIDEO Original article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TolzT9Gwvds
Twin BLOW to Putin as Russian Airfield and Factory BURN BURN BURN... The Military Show Jul 7, 2025 1.78M subscribers ... 291,433 views ... 6.8K likes #themilitaryshow #militarydevelopments #militaryanalysis Ukraine has struck deep inside Russia, hitting a critical electronics factory and a key military airfield in a coordinated assault. The twin strikes disrupted guidance systems, destroyed valuable equipment, and exposed growing cracks in Russia’s war machine. These long-range attacks are part of a broader campaign to weaken Russia’s offensive capabilities at their source. As Ukraine’s drone warfare evolves, the strategic balance continues to shift—with serious implications for the war’s next phase. Support us directly as we bring you independent, up-to-date reporting on military news and global conflicts by clicking here: / @themilitaryshow #militarystrategy #militarydevelopments #militaryanalysis #themilitaryshow SOURCES: https://pastebin.com/q6uyN73d How this content was made Auto-dubbed Audio tracks for some languages were automatically generated. Learn more The Military Show 1.78M subscribers Videos About Facebook Peter Burgess COMMENTARY Peter Burgess Transcript 0:00 Deep in the Chuvash (Choo-Vash) Republic sits the city of Cheboksary (Che-bok-sa-ree), the home of the VNIIR-Progress factory Russia uses to produce vital electronic components for its drones and other equipment. Hundreds of miles away, in the Voronezh (Vuh-Ro-Nesh) Oblast, there is an airfield that is home to a stockpile of Russia’s devastating glide bombs, as well as some of its most valuable fighter jets. Both are now in flames. The victims of a twin blow to Vladimir Putin as both a Russian airfield and a vital factory burn, burn, burn. Ukraine just hit Russia hard with a one-two punch that is going to have plenty of long-term effects on Putin’s brutal invasion. We’ll start with the factory. On July 5, Militarnyi reported that Ukraine had unleashed a horde of strike drones on the Chuvash Republic. Their target was simple – the VNIIR Progress factory in the city of Cheboksary, which is responsible for manufacturing a range of electronic components, including the vital Kometa antennas that Russia is incorporating into many of its drones. Part of the ABS Electro Manufacturing Group, the factory builds both the antennas and 1:01 Global Satellite Navigation System, or GNSS, receivers that work with satellite navigation systems including GPS, Russia’s own GLONASS, and Galileo. It's the Kometa antennas that were the key target here. We’ll dig into them in more detail later, but those antennas are packed into Russia’s Shahed drones, as well as being used in its advanced glide bomb guidance kits and Russia’s Iskander-M ballistic missiles. Kometa antennas protect these weapons from Ukraine’s electronic jamming countermeasures. Without them, Russia’s aerial assaults become far less effective. There’s more. According to Militarnyi, the factory Ukraine just hit also produces circuit breakers, contactless modules, and relays, all of which are used by Russia’s Navy. The Yasen-M class nuclear submarines Putin has patrolling the waters of the world need these components, meaning Ukraine may have just caused Russia some serious naval problems. Add microelectronic components, applied computer equipment, and both hardware and software solutions for shipbuilding, and the loss of the VNIIR factory is a major blow to Putin. And Russia can’t deny this happened. How do we 2:01 know? Footage shared to the Astra Telegram channel shows that authorities in Cheboksary have already restricted access to the VNIIR-Progress factory as a cleanup operation is underway. As Astra reports, “In Cheboksary, after a drone attack, police blocked the entrance to the territory of JSC VNIIR-Progress, as evidenced by eyewitness footage. The enterprise produces Kometa antennas for the Russian army, which protect the drones of the Russian Armed Forces from Ukrainian electronic warfare systems. After the attack on June 9, it had already suspended operations.” That’s an interesting point. July 5 wasn’t the first time that Ukraine struck the VNIIR-Progress facility. It also hit the factory hard about a month earlier, targeting several of its key workshops and causing the plant to cease operations. Russia, of course, claimed that the initial attack wasn’t effective. Head of the Chuvash Republic, Oleg Nikolaev (Oh-Leg Nee-Kuh-LyEv), told reporters that Russia’s air defenses had shot down the June drone horde and that the factory was only on fire because it had been hit by drone debris. A common “explanation” from Russia. One that nobody believes because fires of the magnitude seen at VNIIR-Progress don’t happen because a facility 3:04 got hit with a little bit of debris. They happen because Ukraine’s drones score direct hits against their targets. Astra provides more details in its Telegram post, adding, “As ASTRA reported, on the morning of July 5, drones attacked the capital of the Chuvash Republic, Cheboksary. A fire broke out in the area of the Vutherm hot water boiler plant on Lapsarsky Proyezd (Lap-sar-skee Pro-yeez-ed). It is unknown what exactly is burning. Local authorities have not yet commented on the attack.” Footage of the strike was also shared on the Militarnyi YouTube channel, courtesy of Astra. The 22 seconds of video doesn’t seem to show much at first. We hear what sounds like drones or something similar whirring away in the background, but there’s no clear shot of the weapons Ukraine used to strike the VNIIR-Progress plant. Then, the footage zooms in. And that allows us to see that what previously appeared to be clouds in the distance is actually the smoke rising from the Russian factory. The drones had already hit their targets and VNIIR-Progress was in flames. This was a devastating one-two punch on a key Russian factory. In June, Ukraine forced 4:01 that factory to close down temporarily with a devastating drone strike against some of its workshops. July 5 brought with it another strike. And this one may have taken our VNIIR-Progress forever. Speaking about one-two punches, that’s not the only one Ukraine has landed on Russia. In addition to the factory attack, Ukraine has also devastated a key airfield in the Voronezh Oblast, which is over 800 miles away from Cheboksary. Also on July 5, Newsweek reported that Ukraine’s drones had hit home on the Borisoglebsk (Boh-Ree-So-glebsk) airfield. That airfield is home to a large warehouse, which Newsweek says serves as a storage unit for Russian fighter jets, devastating glide bombs, and several more of Putin’s military assets. Specifically, Putin keeps some of Russia’s most advanced fighter jets at the facility, including its Su-34, Su-35s, and Su-30SM jets. Newsweek adds that residents of Voronezh say that Ukraine hit the airfield hard on July 5, causing up to 10 explosions starting from 2 am. Those strikes have been confirmed by the NASA Fire Information for Resource Management System, which Astra says has reported a massive 5:02 fire in the vicinity of the airfield. More details about the attack come from CNN, which reports that Ukraine’s General Staff took to Facebook to confirm the strike on Borisoglebsk. The staff pointed out that the airfield is home to training aircraft, likely meaning the various Sukhoi fighter jets we mentioned earlier, along with glide bombs and “possibly other aircraft.” that Ukraine’s target was a warehouse at the Borisoglebsk airfield. However, it adds that Ukraine’s attack may have destroyed at least one of Russia’s training and combat aircraft, along with a storage facility for Russia’s glide bombs. Russia has issued only limited comments, focusing on drone interceptions rather than confirming any strike damage.. The Kyiv Independent reports that all the Russian Defense Ministry has said is that it intercepted 42 of Ukraine’s drones during a three-hour operation that saw Ukraine attack the Belgorod (Bell-Guh-Rod), Kursk (Koor-Sk), and Bryansk (Bree-YAn-Sk) oblast. At least two of those drones were shot down near St. Petersburg, the ministry says, forcing the closure of the nearby Pulkovo (Pool-Kuh-Voh) airport. Three more were shot down over the Smolensk (Smo-Lensk) Oblast, according to the region’s governor, 6:03 as were several over the Voronezh Oblast. As for direct hits… Russia isn’t saying anything. And that’s par for the course when it comes to Russia’s responses to Ukraine’s drone strikes. It always focuses on what it shot down while claiming that any damage caused happened due to debris. The reality is much different. Both a vital factory and a key Russian airfield are now burning because has left Russia reeling. And this assault matters for several reasons. First, there’s the potential loss of the previously mentioned Kometa antennas to consider. In March, Forbes Senior Contributor David Hambling wrote about these antennas, noting that they’re playing a key role in the electronic warfare arms race that has emerged between Russia and Ukraine since Putin launched his invasion. We’ve touched on what those antennas do already. They serve as vital components in the guidance systems Russia builds into its glide bombs, drones, and some of its missiles. The Kometa lies at the center of the arms race Hambling mentions. He talks about Russia’s Shahed drones and its 7:00 glide bombs, noting that Russia launched 1,050 of the former and 1,300 of the latter at Ukraine in just one week the previous February. “Both weapons use the Russian Kometa (“Comet”) satellite guidance system,” Hambling reports. “Ukraine has deployed vast numbers of electronic jamming and spoofing devices to make the weapons to miss their targets. Russia has responded by successively upgrading Kometa, increasing the number of antenna elements from 4 to 8 to 12 and beyond to beat the jammers.” Therein lies the problem for Ukraine. And the reason it targeted the VNIIR-Progress plant. Hambling adds that this particular plant is the only one in Russia capable of manufacturing Kometa antennas, which were introduced in 2017 with the unique selling point that it’s capable of filtering out electronic jamming signals. Ukraine uses those signals to confuse the guidance systems built into the aerial weapons Putin is launching at its cities and infrastructure. The same writer also provides more details about how the Kometa antennas work. He says they’re technically referred to as Controlled Reception Pattern Antennas, or CRPAs, and they use several antenna elements capable of combining their signals. Amplification is made possible by this design., 8:04 though that’s not all the Kometa is capable of. “The most obvious approach is amplification: adding two signals together to boost the amplification,” Hambling writes. “But it can also be used for subtraction. By shifting the phase of a signal when it is combined, a CRPA can selectively remove one signal from the output, effectively tuning it out.” That’s the problem Ukraine has with weapons that are equipped with Kometa in a nutshell. The Kometa’s ability to filter signals out means that Ukraine’s jamming efforts are practically useless. Kometa has multiple antenna elements. One of those elements may get affected by Ukraine’s jamming, but that’s not enough to send a bomb or missile off course. The other antenna elements, which aren’t affected, override the corrupted signal picked up by the single antenna Ukraine can impact, subtracting it from the equation so that jamming has no effect. Logically, that also means that the more antenna elements that are built into a Kometa, the less effective Ukraine’s jamming efforts become. When VNIIR-Progress introduced the Kometa, it had four antenna elements. Russia has been upgrading it since then. In April, United24 Media reported that Russia is now equipping its glide 9:02 bombs with Kometas that contain 12 elements, or “channels,” that make them practically impervious to Ukraine’s jamming efforts. More elements mean more resistance, along with improved satellite navigation for Russia’s aerial weapons. So, we see clear logic in the VNIIR-Progress assault. most terrifying weapons. Fewer missiles, drones, and glide bombs hit their targets on Ukraine’s territory. That means reduced pressure on the country’s stretched defenses. Speaking about glide bombs, they were a key target in Ukraine’s other attack on the Borisoglebsk airfield. If hitting VNIIR-Progress was about destroying the jamming-resistant guidance system those bombs are now using, the Borisoglebsk was all about taking out as many of these weapons as possible. And Ukraine needs to do that. Russia has been hitting it hard with glide bombs for much of the war. Glide bombs came to prominence during the first half of 2024, when Putin started using them in massive volumes to cause severe damage to Ukraine’s cities and infrastructure. The BBC 10:00 reported on them in May of that year, providing the basic details. Russia creates glide bombs by taking “dumb” bombs and equipping them with special GPS-navigated glide kits that allow the bombs to be fired from behind the front lines before they glide to their targets using special fold-out wings. These bombs are typically the FAB series of “dumb” bombs, which previously had no form of guidance and were instead designed to be dropped from aircraft directly above a target. Russia has thousands of these FAB bombs, with the heaviest of them weighing around 1.5 tons. For context, a single Russian 152-millimeter artillery shell packs about 14.3 pounds of explosive material. A FAB-1500 equipped with a glide kit weighs a little over 1,300 pounds. That’s almost 93 times the explosive potential of an artillery shell, and Russia has been buffeting Ukraine with these terrifying weapons for well over a year. In March 2024 alone, Russia launched 3,000 glide bombs at Ukraine, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. It’s only gotten worse since. In January 2025, Reuters reported that Russia had launched 51,000 glide bombs at Ukraine since Putin 11:06 launched his invasion. If we assume that Russia was dropping these bombs from the start of the war, that would amount to around 1,400 glide bombs per month. However, that’s not accurate. Russia came up with glide bombs toward the end of 2023, with the vast majority launched up to January hitting Ukraine in 2024. Reuters says that Ukraine was hit with 40,000 of Russia’s glide bombs in 2024 alone, creating a monthly rate of around 3,300 – about what the Zelenskyy reported back in March 2024. Back on April 3, The Ukraine Crisis Media Center noted that Russia hasn’t slowed down with its glide bomb assaults. On Day 1,134 of the war, it says that Zelenskyy claimed that Russia hit Ukraine’s Sumy (Soo-Me) region with nearly 50 glide bombs in a single day. That region is being targeted because it’s key to Russia’s summer offensive. Hit Sumy hard with glide bombs, Russia’s logic goes, and you tear down Ukraine’s defenses so that Russian troops on the ground can take territory. It's a tactic that has worked for Putin plenty of times before, as Radio Free 12:02 Europe/Radio Liberty said toward the end of April. It showcased several Ukrainian cities and towns, all of which have become bombed-out shells of what they used to be. Chasiv Yar (Chas-Eev Yar), Toretsk (Toh-Ret-Sk), Vovchansk (Vow-Chan-Sk), Bakhmut (Bak-Mutt), Maryinka (Mah-Reen-Kah), and many others all bear the scars of Putin’s devastating aerial assaults. Ukraine’s one-two punch on July 5 had a serious impact on Putin’s glide bombs. It took out both the factory Russia used to make the Kometa antennas being packed into those bombs and a stockpile of the bombs themselves. Russia certainly hasn’t run out of glide bombs. But from now on, those bombs may be less accurate and, in the immediate sense, Russia won’t be able to send them from Borisoglebsk to airfields that are closer to the front lines. And that’s not all that Ukraine achieved with its Borisoglebsk strike. We mentioned earlier that The Kyiv Independent reported that Ukraine may have taken out at least one of the trainer aircraft at that airfield. That’s another problem for Putin because Russia has a problem with its pilots that the Kremlin doesn’t want to talk about: It’s quickly running out of experienced pilots that would allow Russia to dominate Ukraine’s airspace. This isn’t a new problem for Putin. In April 2023, Business Insider reported on a 13:03 study that revealed years of inadequate pilot training may have been behind Russia’s initial struggles to use its massive air force to gain air superiority in Ukraine. That study, published by The Royal United Services Institute, claims, “Very few Russian fixed-wing pilots had significant training or currency for very low-altitude close air support in contested airspace, since this never formed part of their core training tasks before the invasion.” It also points out that, prior to Putin’s invasion, Russia hadn’t invested heavily enough in the various sensors, weapons, and training programs that Western air forces spend their money on, which is why so many of Russia’s pilots were getting shot out of the skies during the early months of the invasion. That revelation reveals why Putin relies so heavily on glide bombs today. He can’t risk sending his aircraft into Ukraine because his pilots aren’t up for the job. That situation hasn’t gotten any better for Russia. The quality of the country’s pilots has been diminishing ever since the war began, with most successful takedowns of Russia’s aircraft also involving the killing or capture of an experienced pilot. What does that leave Russia? Inexperienced pilots 14:03 who can do little more than take off, hover, and launch glide bombs at Ukraine. And now, Putin may not even be able to train as many of those types of pilots. With at least one of Russia’s trainer aircraft gone thanks to the Borisoglebsk strike, Ukraine has shown that its long-range strikes aren’t just about taking out Russia’s offensive capabilities directly. It’s also doing long-term damage to Putin’s air force. A slowdown in pilot training ultimately leads to the same results as the strikes against Kometa production and Russia’s glide bomb storage facilities – fewer bombs being launched at Ukraine’s cities. There’s one more thing Ukraine achieved with its July 5 twin blow to Russia. It’s something that Ukraine has been doing since 2024 – it took the war onto Russian territory. Part of Ukraine’s strategy during the latter half of 2024 and into 2025 has been to undermine Russia’s strike capabilities using long-range drone attacks. The idea, according to Espreso Global, is twofold – to wear down Russia’s long-term capacity to wage war against Ukraine while undermining the world’s view of Russia as a powerful military force. 15:00 We’ve seen this many times before. Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb is an excellent example, as it took out several of the nuclear-capable bombers Russia uses to launch bombs and missiles at Ukraine. These types of operations are part of a wider Ukrainian strategy to chip away at Russia’s ability to wage war. That’s what we saw on July 5. Taking out Kometas, glide bombs, and even training aircraft diminished Russia’s military. Ukraine brings the war to Russia. And in doing so, it limits Russia’s ability to escalate the war inside Ukraine. The Council on Foreign Relations says that Ukraine’s long-range strikes also emphasize just how fruitless Putin’s attempts to modernize the Russian military have been. “The Russian army reflects Russian society: top-down control, indiscipline, and corruption. The war in Ukraine reveals the futility of Putin’s ten-year investment program to modernize his army. Nothing has succeeded—not organizational reform, the introduction of new equipment, or enhanced training. The Russians have failed on every front,” the council says. Therein lies another problem for Putin. He wants the world to see Russia as some sort of military monolith. And ironically, that’s exactly what he’s down. A 16:02 monolith is defined as any sort of political structure that is believed to be indivisible, which is what Putin wants the world to see. But monoliths are also slow to change. They can’t adapt to the changing face of warfare, eventually rendering them obsolete. That’s what we’re seeing now in so many areas of Russia’s military. The country’s reliance on outdated equipment combined with Putin’s inability to modernize has made the monolith a source of humiliation time and time again for Russia’s leader. July 5 only adds to that humiliation. Ukraine’s twin blow has put Russia on the back foot as it loses some of its key weapons and components. Look for more of these types of long-range attacks in the future. Ukraine is targeting Russia’s factories and airfields. If it hits enough of both, it may just have found a pathway to victory against Putin’s marauding forces. And as all of this is happening, Putin is running out of the money he needs to replenish Russia’s military losses. Russia’s central bank is begging Putin to end his war as the country’s economy teeters on the brink of total collapse. Find out more in our video and remember to subscribe to The Military Show for more commentary on the latest developments in the Ukraine war.

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