Russian oil pipeline bombed by Ukrainian drone bombers

30 January, 2025 FAB-250 M54 bomb suspended from a Ukrainian drone, January 2025. Photo: t.me/vanek_nikolaev A Ukrainian unmanned aircraft dropped a 250-kilogram bomb on a Russian strategic facility in the Bryansk region.

Ukrainian blogger Nikolaevsky Vanyok reported on this. On the night of January 30, the 14th Regiment of Unmanned Aircraft Systems used at least one modernized aircraft to bomb the Novozybkov oil pumping station of the Druzhba pipeline. The plane was carrying one FAB-250 M54 250-kilogram bomb and two smaller shells that looked like artillery mines.

It is not known whether it managed to return to Ukraine after the mission. As of 13:00, Russian media did not publish images of the downed aircraft. This is not the first time that such systems have been involved in strikes against Russia: detailed photos of crashed planes marked by the blogger "Nikolaevsky Vanyok" were published last year.

Militarnyi considers information about these unmanned systems sensitive, but a year ago, Ukrainian and foreign researchers successfully identified them as modified E-300 SkyRanger and A-22 Foxbat. The planes were equipped with a bomb launch pylon and an onboard optoelectronic station that could be used for target search and precision bombing.

E-300. Russia, 2024

Optical station on board the E-300.

Russia, 2024

Pylon with a suspended bomb on board the E-300. Russia, 2024

E-300. Russia, 2024

The affected oil pumping station was located less than a hundred kilometers from the Ukrainian border.

At the same time, previous findings have been made more than 1,000 kilometers away. Last April, one of the converted kamikaze drones attacked the Russian industrial agglomeration Alabuga, which houses the Shahed-136 strike drone production center. This facility is located about 1,200 kilometers from Ukraine.

According to the CyberBoroshno geo-positioning project, these are the same bombers that repeatedly hit the Russian oil refinery Kristall in Engels, 700 km from the Russian-Ukrainian border.

The oil storage facility of the Kristall plant is located about 8 kilometers from the Engels-2 strategic aviation airfield.