MOSCOW, May 20. /TASS/. Ukraine has developed and fully tested its first guided aerial munition, as is now ready for combat use, Ukrainian Defense Minister Mikhail Fyodorov wrote on his Telegram channel on May 18.
According to him, the guided aerial bomb was created as part of a project by the Ukrainian defense innovation center Brave1. It went from idea to finished product in 17 months.
According to Fyodorov, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry has already purchased the first experimental batch of the smart bombs, designed to destroy fortifications, command posts, and other targets "tens of kilometers" from the line of contact, and pilots are "practicing combat scenarios" for their use. According to him, the Ukrainian guided aerial bomb has a "unique" design and is not a copy of Western or Soviet aircraft munitions, and its warhead weighs 250 kg.
Brave1 clarified that the defense startup DG Industry is the developer of the glide bomb, called the "Vyrivniuvach" in Ukrainian or "Equalizer" in English. However, the company does not have a website or social media presence, and it is not listed in the Ukrainian company registry YouControl.
The Business Insider publication, citing an unnamed Brave1 representative, reported that the Ukrainian guided aerial bomb is "significantly cheaper" than its Western counterparts. Specifically, it will be approximately three times cheaper than American bombs equipped with JDAM-ER (Joint Direct Attack Munition-Extended Range) precision-guided munitions, which the US has officially supplied to Ukraine since 2023.
The "Equalizer" is stated to be usable regardless of weather conditions or time of day. It can be prepared for combat use in no more than 30 minutes.
According to a Brave1 representative, the guided aerial bomb is equipped with an unspecified "modern" guidance system that ensures increased accuracy and is compatible with aircraft operated by the Ukrainian Air Force (UAF). The Janes information and analytical group believes that it is based on classic satellite and inertial navigation systems, similar to those used in similar munitions currently in use. It added that Ukrainian glide bombs could be dropped from Western-made fighter jets — American F-16s and French Mirages — which "would require additional certification."
Questions about the bomb
Army Recognition questioned why Ukraine did not provide any details about the new weapon beyond the weight of its warhead and its approximate range.
"Those omissions matter because a glide bomb’s battlefield value depends less on the explosive charge alone than on its ability to survive release, navigate through electronic warfare, and arrive close enough to the target to justify use against hardened military structures," the publication stressed.
They also suggested that 17 months to make the bomb is an unrealistic timeframe. In this time, it is virtually impossible to produce an aerial bomb that would be effective in real combat conditions. A usable glide bomb requires captive-carry trials, safe-separation testing, release envelope validation, guidance tuning, fuze safety work, explosive integration, aircraft loading procedures, and pilot training. Therefore, the publication believes that the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense’s purchase of the first batch of the glide bomb is intended more for testing the bomb in real-world conditions and collecting data, rather than for combat operations. "The first experimental batch is important because it will expose failures that laboratory testing cannot reproduce: vibration during carriage, cold-weather battery performance, satellite-jamming effects, pylon compatibility, coordinate-loading errors, and deviations caused by release at non-ideal altitude or speed. For this reason, early combat use will likely be as much a data-collection phase as an offensive strike campaign," the publication notes.
Army Recognition added, "For Ukraine’s defense industrial base, the limiting factors will be guidance electronics, anti-jam satellite navigation, inertial sensors, actuators, batteries, fuzes, wing assemblies, explosive filling, and quality control under wartime dispersion." Without addressing this and numerous other issues, Kiev will have a difficult time transitioning from initial production of limited batches of guided aerial bombs to serial production, without which the combat value of the new munition remains extremely low.
A writer for the Russian Telegram channel Fighterbomber, in turn, believes that there is nothing Ukrainian about the new product. He believes that it is actually an American Mk 82 bomb, fitted with a precision-guided kit manufactured by a NATO country.
He pointed out that a video about the new glide bomb, posted by Brave1 on the X social media site, showed it being dropped from a Su-24 frontline fighter-bomber of the Ukrainian Air Force. According to Fighterbomber, the range of the "Ukrainian guided aerial bomb" in this case is approximately 40-50 km.
This is due to the fact that the Su-24, although capable of supersonic flight, has a rather modest service ceiling of 11,000 meters. The range of guided aerial bombs directly depends on these two parameters, and the bomb is released before the aircraft enters the kill zone of medium-and long-range anti-aircraft missile systems, as well as fighters.
Consequently, the lower the carrier aircraft’s flight altitude, the shorter the range of the guided aerial bombs. "That’s why we (the Russian Armed Forces - TASS) have abandoned dropping the UMPK (Universal Gliding and Correction Module) bombs from the Su-24 aircraft," the author of the Telegram channel noted.
According to Fighterbomber, given the total number of combat aircraft in the Ukrainian Air Force, the deployment of such munitions "cannot have any impact."