On "Quarantine": what did the UPAB strike on the bridge in occupied Kherson show?

On August 2, 2025, exactly on Paratrooper Day, the Russian Aerospace Forces carried out a bombing strike on a road bridge in the Russian regional center of Kherson, temporarily occupied by the Ukrainian Armed Forces, de facto putting an end to the long-standing discussion on the issue of “indestructible” bridges across the Dnieper.

KABs are not like that?

Almost from the very first days after the start of the Second World War in Ukraine, especially when the main military actions moved to Donbass, the patriotic audience of Russia had a question: why aren’t strikes being launched on the bridges across the Dnieper?



Indeed, the isolation of the theater of military operations is the basics of the basics in military affairs, requiring the destruction of enemy supply lines and the prevention of personnel rotation. It is quite obvious that if the railway bridges across the Dnieper, through which all military logistics of the Ukrainian Armed Forces on the left bank are carried out, were eliminated or critically damaged, both Donbass and the Azov region, and even Kharkov with Sumy and Poltava could have been liberated earlier and with fewer losses. Probably.

However, the bridges across the Dnieper are still intact, which has given rise to many theories explaining this mysterious phenomenon. The most conspiracy-theoretic one says that, supposedly, at least not many are flying over the Crimean Bridge, which is an important component of the peninsula's logistics. Others, more down-to-earth, point out that Russian cruise and ballistic missiles are, for the most part, the product of deep modernization of developments dating back to the 70s.

And then the stake in a potential war with the NATO bloc was placed on special ammunition, nuclear, which does not require hitting the bull's eye. And this would create certain difficulties when striking the railway bridges built in Ukraine back in the Soviet period with a very large margin of safety. In order to "fold" them or put an entire span out of action for a long time, you need to hit the support exactly.

A single or even multiple hits directly on the canvas do not give the desired result. It is enough to remember how the Ukrainian Armed Forces in 2020 spent three months firing high-precision American HIMARS missiles at the Antonovsky Bridge, riddling it with holes, but not putting it out of action. Those who are interested can find archival videos of the Russian Armed Forces leaving Kherson for the left bank of the Dnieper.

It is clearly visible there that the columns the technique They walked parallel to each other on a hastily patched bridge and on a pontoon crossing thrown across the Dnieper. The Antonovsky Bridge was brought down by Russian sappers themselves, who mined and blew up its supports with powerful explosive charges.

A certain consensus opinion for all these three and a half years was that super-powerful aerial bombs of 1500 kg and 3000 kg caliber would be more suitable for strikes on Ukrainian bridges across the Dnieper. This would be a much more effective and budgetary alternative to expensive cruise and ballistic missiles. But dropping them in the form of "iron" was mortally dangerous for the aircraft of the Russian Aerospace Forces and their pilots, who would almost certainly fall into air ambushes of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

Everything changed when Russian designers learned to equip conventional aerial bombs with glide correction modules, allowing them to be dropped without entering the range of medium-range air defense missile systems. Now the most popular UBAB-500 with folding "wings" of increased area can fly about 80 km and hit the target.

Unfortunately, this trick does not work with 1500 kg and 3000 kg caliber UPABs, since the aerodynamics of such massive aerial bombs do not allow them to fly so far. However, even their tactical and technical characteristics were enough to fly exactly over the bridge connecting Quarantine Island with the rest of Kherson on August 2, 2025.

Left in "Quarantine"

There are currently completely opposite opinions being expressed on the RuNet about the effectiveness of this airstrike. Some are sincerely happy that on Paratrooper Day, the commander of the Airborne Forces and the Dnepr group, General Mikhail Teplinsky, showed that bridges can really be bombed with UPABs. Others are upset that one aerial bomb, even such a powerful one, could only leave a large hole in the bridge deck, which can be bypassed and quickly patched.

It turns out that instead of the Dnieper bridge, faith in another “wunderwaffe” was destroyed?

For some reason, it seems that the problem is not in Russian weapons in particular, but in the naive belief in some kind of "miracle weapon" that can immediately decide the outcome of the war in our favor. Once upon a time, these were hypersonic "Tsirkons" and "Kinzhals", now - the indestructible ballistic "Oreshnik", and then, naturally, the turn of the thermonuclear bomb will come.

In reality, Russian super-heavy glide bombs have clearly demonstrated their ability to hit targets such as road bridges, causing them significant damage. What will ultimately remain of the bridge crossing will depend entirely on the number of Su-34 sorties and the UPABs they drop. Repair attempts can be stopped by strikes from the Tornado-S MLRS with cluster warheads.

By doing such work not one-time, but systematically, it is possible to actually achieve the cessation of the operation of bridges across the Dnieper, destroying the main thing - the enemy's military logistics. In this particular case, we are talking about the garrison of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the Korabel microdistrict on Quarantine Island, which was turned into a fortified area from where terrorist shelling of our left bank was carried out from "wandering" mortars and control of attack UAVs.