Russia has debuted its upgraded FAB-1500 guided glide bombs in Ukraine, likely putting renewed pressure on Ukraine’s air-defense systems along the front lines.
Unverified footage circulating online appears to show a bomb striking a multistory building in a front-line town in eastern Ukraine. “Epic footage of a FAB-1500 direct hit on a target in Krasnohorivka,” one Russian military blogger said over the weekend, referring to a town west of the Russian-controlled regional capital of the Donetsk region.
The FAB-1500 is the largest of the Soviet-era FAB series that also includes the FAB-250 and FAB-500. The series of bombs are old Soviet-era weapons that have been upgraded with guidance kits to become precision bombs. The new modifications have also added pop-out wings, meaning they glide towards their intended target.
Moscow has started deploying the 1,550-kilogram (3,120-pound) weapons against Ukrainian targets, CNN reported on Sunday. Newsweek has reached out to the Russian Defense Ministry for comment via email.
Russia has used the smaller FAB-500 extensively, including in the destruction of the strategic eastern Ukrainian town of Avdiivka before Ukrainian forces withdrew from the settlement last month. Ukrainian air force officials warned in April 2023 that Russia had started converting FAB-500 aerial bombs into cruise missile-like weapons, fired outside the range of Ukrainian air-defense systems.
“There are signs of preparation for the mass use” of 1,500-kilogram bombs,” Ukraine’s air force commander, Lieutenant General Mykola Oleschuk, said at the time.
The FAB-1500 weighs far more than the Joint Direct Attack Munitions, or JDAMS, guided bombs used by Ukraine.
The new glide bombs allow Russia’s strike aircraft to “hit targets on the ground with high precision” without risking Ukrainian air-defense missiles taking the jets out, said military expert, David Hambling. “The current version has an accuracy of better than 10 meters, which pretty much guarantees destruction with a weapon as big as the FAB-1500,” he told Newsweek.
“Such weapons also have a significant morale effect, and the tremendous explosions are seen and heard over a wide area,” he added.
The new FAB-1500 bombs put “a lot of pressure on soldiers’ morale,” a Ukrainian soldier fighting in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region told CNN. “Not all of our guys can withstand it. While they are more or less used to the FAB-500 by now, but the FAB-1500 is hell.”
The FAB-1500 may not be a game-changing weapon, Hambling argued, but they “will do real damage.”
“It’s not the fact that they are very destructive which makes them effective, but the new correction module which has been recently upgraded to ensure precision,” said Marina Miron, a post-doctoral researcher with the War Studies Department at King’s College London.
Russia has upgraded its unguided munitions with a kit known as a UMPK, adding gliding and guidance to the “dumb” bombs, effectively turning them into “smart” weapons. In the summer of 2023, an “improved version” appeared that increased the accuracy and range of FAB bombs, Miron told Newsweek.
Over the weekend, Captain Dmytro Lykhovyi, a spokesperson for Kyiv’s forces operating in eastern Ukraine, said Russia had used three guided glide bombs on the Donetsk city of Myrnohrad.
