For children they are a game. For boys, however, letting them float in the air on special days is a good omen. For the Ukrainians, however, they are a weapon to be used against the Russians. These are aerostatic bomb balloons for military use.
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Recent demolitions
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu recently said that Russian air defenses shot down 37 Ukrainian balloons since the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.
Many of the balloons have arrived in the last few days. The Kremlin reported five balloon shootings on April 18 and two more on April 20.: one of the latter reached as far as Moscow, 275 miles from the border with Ukraine. Another balloon crashed just inside Russian territory in March.
Description and cost of air balloons
The balloons all look the same: an inexpensive envelope, a simple satellite communications relay, some ballast, and a few pounds of explosives. It costs just a few hundred euros, making it the cheapest and lightest weapon currently in use by Ukraine, whose arsenal also includes long-range attack drones, British and French-made cruise missiles and ballistic missiles from the United States.
Ukrainian weapons against the Russians
The balloons are part of a larger campaign of Ukrainian raids against strategic targets such as air bases, weapons factories and oil refineries hundreds of miles from Russia and in occupied Ukraine.
The Ukrainians recently received supplies of American rockets. Starting from March, the United States would have shipped more than a hundred Atacms, high-precision missiles capable of traveling up to 300 kilometers: a greater range than those supplied so far by the governments of the United Kingdom and France. Ukraine immediately took action, bombing Russian air bases and air defense batteries in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.
Ukrainian attacks on Russian air bases have intensified to the point that, in recent days, the Kremlin has moved dozens of its best warplanes to bases hundreds of miles away – where Ukrainian cruise and ballistic missile ships cannot. to arrive.
Balloon bombs in wars from the twentieth century to today
But exploding balloons are nothing new. They were used in at least three wars in the twentieth century alone, but always with poor results. It is not irrelevant, however, that they are not guided, but float in the air driven by the wind.
Japan floated nearly 300 bomb-laden balloons across the Pacific Ocean in 1944 and 1945. The only victims were a pastor’s wife and five Sunday school students in Oregon, who accidentally triggered the explosive cargo during a day of fishing of a balloon that fell into the water.
The Japanese balloon bombs were more effective than the bombs that Islamic State terrorists used in Syria in 2015. The seemingly harmless balloon, but filled with explosive payload, would not have caused any damage to the Syrian forces.
Why use explosive balloons: pros and cons
Balloons can function as wide-range spy systems, which is why Russia has launched some over Ukraine since 2022 and China usually flies them over the western Pacific Ocean, last year even over the United States.
Surveillance doesn’t require much precision. High-resolution cameras and sensitive electronic receivers can collect useful information across thousands of square miles. An air raid, on the other hand, requires precision: missing by a few meters can make the difference between a successful raid and a failed one. An unguided explosive balloon is, at best, a way for one country to force another country to waste precious air defense resources trying to shoot them down.
One of the goals of Ukraine’s military campaign is to force Russia to redeploy its radar and surface-to-air missile batteries over a larger territory.
“Ukrainian drone attacks against targets inside Russia are likely increasing pressure on available Russian air defense assets,” the Washington, DC-based Institute for the Study of War explained.
And for Ukrainians this pressure represents an opportunity. Russian air defenses thinning along the front line are one less risk for Ukrainian warplanes operating directly on the battlefield. “You can’t defend everywhere,” observed retired U.S. Army Gen. Mark Hertling.
In shooting down the balloons, the Russians waste resources that they could use to destroy the Ukrainian weapons that matter, those with a higher degree of precision.
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