Ukrainian missiles hit Russia’s only Soyuz-2 rocket factory
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Using its Flamingo missiles, the Ukraine last night successfully damaged and possibly destroyed Russia’s factory where it builds the Soyuz-2 rockets, located in the city of Samara about 550 miles northeast of the Ukrainian border.
The image to the right shows the impact point, Building 106A of the the Progress Rocket Space Centre in Samara, which is where the Soyuz-2 and the upgraded not-yet-operational Soyuz-5 rockets are manufactured. Local reports also say Building 106B was damaged, which the company uses to integrate satellites [mostly military] to the rockets for shipment.
It appears this factory is a single-point failure. It is the only one in Russia that manufactures these rockets, used to launch Soyuz manned capsules and Progress freighters to ISS as well as military satellites and Russia’s new Rassvet constellation, aimed at providing it is own Starlink equivalent. If damaged badly, it means Russia’s ability to do any of these things is seriously limited, at least for awhile. It has Soyuz-2 rockets in stock, but only so many. And even if it gets the building rebuilt, the Ukraine has now demonstrated it knows where it is, and has the ability to hit it again.
The Ukraine considers Rassvet a military threat, as it will give Russia’s military high quality communications within the areas it has invaded, comparable (though likely inferior) to Starlink. In this context, the Ukraine has already used drones to threaten Rassvet launches at the Plesetsk spaceport in northwest Russia, forcing Russia to hide launch dates and even delay launches.
This attack illustrates Russia’s increasing vulnerability to Ukrainian drones and missiles, and signals the growing escalation of the war into Russia. Worse, Russia has a limited ability to respond, and either it gets Putin to end the war (very unlikely), removes him from power, or it does what Putin himself has hinted, use nuclear weapons against the Ukraine. The latter action would be incredibly stupid and counter productive, but then, everything about this Russian invasion of the Ukraine has been incredibly stupid and counter productive. We would be foolish to expect better from Putin now.
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This was pretty much inevitable. Ukraine has hit other targets in the Samara area and a 550 km. run for a Flamingo cruise missile is barely a warm-up jog. Ukraine also tends to hit high-priority targets repeatedly, sometimes in rapid succession and sometimes after letting the Russians do what repairs they are able to first. A number of petroleum refineries have gotten this latter sort of treatment over the past couple of years.
This will likely not impact Russian ISS operations for some time – perhaps not even at all during the remaining likely lifespan of the ISS. The Soyuz and Progress vehicles are, I believe, built elsewhere and their launches take place in Kazakhstan, a separate country with which Ukraine has no hostilities. Any stockpiled Soyuz launchers are probably stashed at or near the Kazakh launch site at Baikonur and safe from Ukrainian depredations. Not so the ones intended for military launches from Plesetsk. Any damage to the Samara factory will hit military use cases of the Soyuzes earliest and hardest.
“The Ukraine considers Rassvet a military threat, as it will give Russia’s military high quality communications within the areas it has invaded, comparable (though likely inferior) to Starlink.”
While the above is true, the threat posed by Rassvet that concerns Ukraine the most is that Rassvet terminals can be mounted on drones, allowing those drones to be guided by a human operator while striking anywhere in Ukrainian territory. It turns an ordinary drone into a SLAM ER.
“…the Ukraine has already used drones to threaten Rassvet launches at the Plesetsk spaceport in northeast Russia…”
That would be northwest Russia, up near Archangel.
“…or it does what Putin himself has hinted, use nuclear weapons against the Ukraine.”
This is one of the few areas in which Biden’s policy was better than Trump’s. When the nuclear threat was first made years ago, Biden’s team quietly told Russia that if they used any WMDs (nuclear, biological, or chemical) in Ukraine, America would destroy Russia’s prized naval base in Sevastopol and sink the entire Black Sea fleet. When Ukraine effectively took Sevastopol and the Black Sea fleet out of operation themselves, the policy was updated to America entering the war and destroying everything Russian within the borders of Ukraine.
Russia itself would not be threatened, so Russian doctrine would preclude escalating to using nuclear weapons against the West. But Russia would suffer a huge humiliating defeat, and they knew it. Despite all their bluster the Russian officials know that Russia is no match for the United States. It will back down if the Russian state is not at risk, which in the Biden scenario it would not be.
This is a case where Biden’s quiet diplomacy was miles above Trump’s bluster (“I’ll nuke the Kremlin!”), which in this case is not only counterproductive but outright dangerous.
The Black Sea fleet is effectively gone, and Sevastopol is out of reach for Russia, all thanks to Ukrainian drones and missiles.
As others have called it, this is the first twenty-first-century war. Both sides have gone asymmetric. Ukraine is destroying Russia’s logistics and their economy. Russia is targeting Ukrainian civilians, and maintaining a low-level war against NATO, purposely staying just below the threshold for NATO’s article 5. What happens at the front is almost irrelevant, except for the tremendous cost in manpower to Russia.
Embarrassing for Putin, and still Russia has the mass to continue, I do not know about the will.
What is the exit strategy?
Either one of the leaders being taken out by their own?
Hi Neocons,
Sooner or later the CIA and the Euro Deep State will tire of Zelensky and replace him. The Russians will continue to roll east. It will be dark chilly winter for the poor people of Ukraine and their Nazi overlords.
As corrupt as the Ukraine’s government might be, there are likely more people in the Democratic Party with that Nazi mentality (some of whom are openly Jew-haters) than in the Ukraine. And there are certainly more of those power-hungry thug-types in Russia. Remember: Russia invaded the Ukraine, not the other way around.
Remember too that Zelensky is Jewish, and his grandfather along with three of his father’s brothers died in the Holocaust. Germans also killed his father during its invasion of the Ukraine in World War II. I doubt he has much affinity for that line of thought.
“Germans also killed his father during its invasion of the Ukraine in World War II.”
You’re thinking of someone else. His father was a professor and lives.
My information came from Wikipedia, which of course is always suspect, though in this case seemed fair-minded on a political topic for once.
The writing was a bit confusing at that point. The “father” might have instead been Zelinsky’s grandfather, or even great-grandfather, and I misinterpreted the writing.
That the CIA is, in any sense, running Ukraine is a charmingly naive bit of yarn-spinning. One can see why a died-in-the-wool Russian partisan such as yourself might think that – given that the CIA’s opposite number in Russia, the KGB/FSB, has been running that nation since even before the fall of the Soviet Union. But, despite Russia’s centuries-long assumption that all nations are, under the covers, pretty much just like itself, they’re actually not.
And, while there certainly is a European Deep State – several, such in fact – they are all increasingly in bed with Ukraine as a matter of their own self-defense, not running the show there. It's not true that Ukraine is running Europe any more than the reverse, but it's closer to being true in some ways.
Show me where the Russians have been doing any significant "rolling east" for the last year or more. In recent months, the Russians have been losing more ground than they gain and more and more of the ground they notionally hold is being rendered logistically untenable by Ukrainian strikes on supply routes. Routes struck and rendered useless include, of late, the entire Sea of Azov and the Caspian Sea in addition to road and rail routes into and through occupied Ukrainian territory, especially Crimea.
It is likely to be another cold winter in Ukraine. But Ukrainian strikes on Russian energy infrastructure mean that a great many Russians will be facing the same or worse. There is not a single aspect of this war that is improving where Russia is concerned.
First the AN-225, then the F-14s I had hoped would be repatriated….now R-7 may be dead.
Frankly I hope Putin and the Ukes who did this all burn
The Mossad should have left Gerald Bull alone and poisoned Abdul and company in the crib.
Apparently you are as indifferent to geopolitical context as you are to costs in your seemingly bottomless enthusiasm for antique aerospace hardware.
The Russians smashed the AN-225. If the Ukrainians have now smashed the R-7 in return, one can hardly blame them. The R-7, after all, is a current military asset and the AN-225 never was. A great many things get smashed during wars. If the R-7 is truly now gone, I, for one, will shed no tears at its passing.
The same applies to the creaky and barely functional Tomcats in Iranian livery that met their ends earlier this year. Even assuming such a project had been feasible, what would have been the point of “repatriating” these patches-upon-patches shadows of their original selves? To join their now long-retired brethren baking in the sun in the Boneyard at Davis-Monthan?
But then a lot of people, including the Polish Government, just can’t square the circle with his support of Stepan Bandera, the UIA, the Volyn Massacre, and the Ukrainian President’s inability to condem the massacre of civilians. Being true to his faith he should be the first one to condemn taking innocent lives, but at best he remains silent and at worst he shows tacit support for the parties who consider Bandera and the UIA as Heros of Ukraine.
Old grudges are evergreen in that part of the world and no one has clean hands including the Poles and Ukrainians. As the late, great, Tom Lehrer wrote in his song ‘National Brotherhood Week,’ in the verse listing various national and religious antagonisms, “and everybody hates the Jews.”
Endemic anti-semitism aside – that being the one thing Germans, Poles, Ukrainians and Russians held in common at the time – being a Ukrainian in WW2 was really pretty much at least the penultimate definition of being between a rock and a hard place. The ultimate such dilemma, of course, was that of the Jews of any of the listed nationalities.
National heroes are where you find them, I guess. In the US, for example, Margaret Sanger, the co-founder of Planned Parenthood, is revered by most on the political Left as a national heroine despite the fact she was as racist and eliminationist as your typical Nazi.
Overall, I’m inclined to cut people who are clearly wronged and trying to do the right thing in the present considerable slack in such matters anent the failings of their ancestors.
Here is hoping that the Ukranians have not put the people on the ISS in danger by destroying the plant. We are truly getting down to only SpaceX being able to conduct manned launches and cargo launches right now.
That seems wildly unlikely. At worst, as you say, it simply dumps the entire responsibility for ISS logistics and upkeep – including periodic orbit-raising – onto SpaceX. That seems quite doable, especially as SpaceX can launch both of the US vehicles – Dragon and Cygnus – capable of doing that latter chore.
Crew logistics in the absence of Soyuz and Progress would not be difficult to re-jigger either. We could magnanimously continue to carry a Russian on each Crew Dragon mission despite the possible loss of Russian future ability to reciprocate. Perhaps the Ukrainians have done the Russians an inadvertent service in that Russia has already curtailed both Soyuz and Progress missions as an economy measure. Having to do no missions at all will improve Roscosmos’s finances even more. And the lack of any future Soyuz and Progress dockings on the Russian ISS segment should do wonders to ease the structural cracking and air leakage situation. There’s good news for Russia here if you just know where to look.
The limits of “will” as a military asset were pretty clearly established during WW2. The Germans and the Japanese both imagined their allegedly superior will would overcome all material obstacles. It didn’t. Russia, too, will find its physical limits should it be so foolish as to continue to the point of complete inability – which seems, thus far, to be the case. The Ukrainians continue their incremental de-militarization and de-industrialization of the Russian Federation and their military advantages over the Russians continue to increase. As Adam Smith said, “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” We are in the process of finding out just how much ruin remains in the Russian Federation before it ceases to be a going concern.
My own estimate is that Ukraine will have battered Russia into submission by anywhere from six months to two years from now. This war is well past its half-way point, we just don’t know quite how far yet. But we will. And that answer will be in-hand well before Trump leaves office.
This was supposed to be a reply to Cotour but there was some odd behavior, including a connection failure, by the website during the posting process and the comment was, evidently, displaced for some reason.
I noticed that.
Failed economic system though it was, Khrushchev’s handling of Soviet power is a model worth emulating.
He handed the keys of the kingdom to Korolev and Glushko, not their versions of LeMay and Rickover.
The game in all loser countries is to get a nuke and an ICBM quickly enough to where America will leave you alone….since all defense money within the United States is in the pockets of pilots and logisticians equally useless at actually PROTECTING this country from attack from MIRVs and such.
Nikita was but the first.
Keep space professionals well cared for, and keep the other armed forces well away from the trough.
Sadly, that was the real reason Nikita was removed. We had atomic carriers and planes that could reach overseas–so they wanted to match us.
The long erosion of Soviet space (and the end of the USSR itself) started with Khrushchev’s ouster. He was Ukrainian, by the way. Sometimes I wonder if he was secretly poisoning the well….he had a long time to do so.
America needs Space Force as its best funded branch of the service, preferably run out of Huntsville.
Then a neutron bomb detonated over the Pentagon.
That is a proper DOGE