Kyiv’s intelligence services are undermining Moscow’s ability to bombard Ukrainian cities and threaten Nato

A Russian Tu-95 strategic bomber lost a wing in a Ukrainian attack on Engels-2 air base in Saratov Credit: Vantor

Verity Bowman

Verity Bowman is The Telegraph’s Foreign and Global Health Security Reporter, covering conflict, human rights abuses, global development and international health issues, with a particular focus on Ukraine. She previously worked as a News Reporter at the Guardian and was named on the Press Awards’ 30 Under 30 list in 2024.

Published 09 September 2026 

The drone crossed nearly 500 miles of fortified Russian territory before it found its mark.

Ukraine’s target – a Tu-95 strategic bomber – sat on the tarmac at Engels-2, an airbase so deep inside Russia that for decades it was considered untouchable.

The airbase is one of only a handful of sites equipped to arm, service and hold at nuclear readiness the country’s ageing fleet of irreplaceable Soviet-era planes that are a key component of Moscow’s nuclear triad.

When the strike hit at the end of August, it tore away a section of the bomber’s right wing, just behind the second engine.

Within hours, satellite images had captured what Russia would not confirm: another Tu-95, an aircraft Russia has not built a single new unit of since 1992, was almost certainly gone for good.

It was the second such strike on the same base in six weeks. In July, a different Tu-95 at Engels-2 had its tail sheared clean from the fuselage.

Neither aircraft, analysts say, is likely to fly again – adding to several that were already damaged or destroyed in 2025 when Ukraine launched Operation Spiderweb.

“They’re part of Russia’s nuclear triad,” Justin Bronk, a senior research fellow for Airpower and Technology at the Royal United Service Institute (Rusi), told The Telegraph.

“They’ve been used to conduct intensive missile raids against Ukraine for four and a half years. Destroying one, especially at its home base, is a politically poignant thing to do.”

The Tu-95, alongside the newer Tu-160, is one of only two aircraft Russia can use to launch long-range Kh-101 cruise missiles at Ukrainian cities.

Their place in Russia’s nuclear triad gives the ageing bombers a strategic weight far beyond their Cold War-era design.

This summer, a specialised long-range strike unit within Ukraine’s SBU service carried out both strikes.

The drone’s journey was engineered by hours of intelligence work mapping exactly where Russia’s defences thinned out.

The feat was conducted by a drone known as the MICH-2000, with a range of roughly 1,240 miles, far more than the 500 miles needed to reach Engels-2 in a straight line.

That extra range is deliberate. Rather than flying directly, the drone followed a route around known concentrations of Russian air defences, staying close to hills and terrain that block radar.

The deeper explanation behind the strike’s success is not a specific weakness at Engels-2 itself, but a result of Russia’s air defences being stretched to their limits nationwide by Ukraine’s long-range drone campaign, spanning a growing list of targets, from oil refineries to warehouses.

“There’s just less dense air defence cover that the Russians can put at any one site than they used to,” said Mr Bronk. “Even something as important as Engels.”

Estimates vary as to how many Tu-95s Russia still has in service. Robert Tollast, a researcher in the Land Warfare team at Rusi, puts the number at perhaps 20 to 30, possibly fewer, hampered by the maintenance demands of an aircraft that first flew in the 1950s.

That scarcity matters because of what the Tu-95 can do.

Its Kh-101 cruise missile has a range of more than 1,850 miles and carries a 400kg warhead capable of punching through hardened structures, from command bunkers to thermal power stations, that most weapons simply cannot touch.

“The Tu-95s are obviously really important for Russia’s deep-strike campaign, which tends to prioritise, particularly over the winter, Ukrainian power infrastructure,” explained Mr Tollast.

“So the fewer Tu-95s Russia has, the fewer of these missiles can be fired with the devastating warheads and the long range. As we approach another winter, this becomes very critical because, last winter, Ukraine had a power deficit of something like six gigawatts.”

The losses do not stand alone. Oryx, an open-source group that tracks confirmed equipment losses, has recorded at least 10 Tu-95 losses since the start of the invasion of Ukraine, not counting the two most recent strikes at Engels-2.

The pattern emerging at Engels-2 looks less like a series of isolated strikes than a deliberate campaign to shrink permanently a fleet Russia has no way of rebuilding.

It echoes Operation Spiderweb, the audacious June 2025 operation in which Ukraine smuggled attack drones inside Russia itself, hidden in trucks parked near air bases, and used them to strike 41 bombers in a day, the most dramatic single blow to Russian strategic aviation of the war so far.

The Engels-2 strikes are smaller, quieter, and slower, but they draw from the same logic: every bomber destroyed is one Russia will never be able to replace.

Experts say the true cost could also fall on Russia’s posture against Nato.

Russia has also long used the Tu-95 for Cold War-style “harassment” flights near Nato airspace; provocative missions toward the Baltics and Scandinavia designed to demonstrate the country’s readiness to launch a nuclear strike at short notice.

A confrontation with Nato would demand massed, near-simultaneous strikes against many targets at once, launched in the expectation that most missiles would be intercepted, and that Russia might get only one or two such opportunities before its aircraft were destroyed or forced back into a purely nuclear holding role.

A smaller Tu-95 fleet erodes exactly that kind of mass capability.

That creates an uncomfortable trade-off for Moscow. The more depleted the fleet, the harder the choice grows between continuing to expend it against Ukraine now, or preserving what remains for a potential future confrontation with Nato.

“It’s probably even more significant for Russia’s balance of capability against Nato in the next few years than it is for Russia’s capability to sustain its long-range strike campaign against Ukraine,” said Mr Bronk.

Whether this campaign will meaningfully alter how Nato itself thinks about the vulnerability of its own strategic aircraft remains an open question.

But as Ukraine’s ability to reach deep inside Russia becomes less remarkable and more routine, the question hanging over Engels-2 is the same one facing bases far beyond it: if a base built to be untouchable can be hit twice in six weeks, how safe, really, is any of them.

Original article, with illustrations, here :

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/09/09/ukraine-is-quietly-destroying-russias-irreplaceable-bombers/