Russia's Aerospace Forces launched 8,385 glide bombs at Ukraine in July, up 1.4% from 8,266 in June, an average of 270 a day, according to figures compiled from open-source strike monitoring. The increase came alongside a qualitative shift too, with Russia making heavier use of Unified Gliding and Correction Module (UMPK) kits fitted with jet engines that extend their range to as much as 200 km, pushing more of the launch aircraft out of range of Ukrainian air defences.

The bombs themselves are not new technology. A UMPK kit is essentially a set of pop-out wings and a satellite-guidance unit bolted onto a Soviet-design FAB gravity bomb, the same basic weapon Russia's air force has dropped since the 1950s. What has changed is the sheer volume Russia can now afford to fire, and the payload it can deliver: the largest variants in regular use, the FAB-1500 fitted with a UMPK kit, carry up to 1,500 kg of explosive - Russia has also used a 3,000 kg-class version, the FAB-3000, though far less often - dwarfing the roughly 1-2 kg warhead on a standard first-person-view (FPV) strike drone and even the 15-20 kg a heavy-lift bomber drone like Ukraine's Vampire can carry. A drone can take out a soldier or a vehicle with precision; a single glide bomb can flatten the building they are sheltering in.

Precision is not the point

Glide-bomb accuracy is poor, and open-source analysts say official Russian claims about it are fiction. “These numbers are completely made up and far from the reality,” independent analyst Clement Molin wrote, having mapped 40-50% of monthly reported airstrikes since March. On his data, around half of all KABs (guided bomb units) land in open terrain - fields, forests, empty ground - and even where a bomb lands closer to an actual target, precision varies wildly by front-line sector, from as low as 10% to as high as 80-90%. Stripping out the bombs that hit nothing of military value at all, Molin estimates only around 5% of all KABs fired genuinely hit a real position - which on July's volumes would still be roughly 450 bombs a month landing on actual targets, with another 1,000-plus falling near enough to towns, villages or treelines to kill or wound soldiers and civilians regardless. He puts total monthly KAB casualties, dead and wounded, at up to 2,000.

That is the opposite of how Ukraine's own drone fleet operates. Ukrainian FPV drones can identify and strike a single soldier or vehicle with a live video feed guiding the pilot's final seconds, but they carry a tiny warhead by comparison and depend on skilled operators; Ukrainian commanders have put overall FPV mission-success rates at only 20-40%, rising toward 50-59% specifically when a strike on personnel is actually scored. Glide bombs invert that logic entirely: Russia does not need to hit a specific soldier when a 1,500 kg warhead can level the block he is standing in. Precision is a feature Moscow has traded for volume and mass destruction, and it can afford to, because it has thousands of ageing Soviet gravity bombs to convert and a bomber fleet that barely has to cross the front line to launch them.

The same logic of indiscriminate, high-volume terror runs through Russia's use of cheap first-person-view drones against Ukrainian civilians, not just soldiers. As IntelliNews reported this week, the filmed hunting-down of a Kherson market trader by a Russian FPV drone has reignited war-crimes accusations over what has become known as a “human safari” - a campaign in which operators deliberately stalk and strike unarmed civilians going about ordinary business, using exactly the kind of live targeting precision that makes a drone so different, and so much more calculatedly cruel, than a glide bomb dropped on a city block.