Ukraine Is Bombing the Antenna That Keeps Russia's Strike Weapons on Course

The plant that builds the Kometa anti-jamming antennas for Russia's Shaheds, Iskanders and Kalibrs has been struck twice in five weeks, and Kyiv says its campaign against Russia's component factories is just getting started.

Ukrainian FP-5 Flamingo cruise missiles struck the VNIIR-Progress plant in Cheboksary overnight on June 10, President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed, the second confirmed hit on the facility since May 5, according to Kyiv Post. The plant sits more than 900 kilometers from the front line and produces the Kometa antenna, the component that keeps Shahed drones, Iskander-M ballistic missiles and Kalibr cruise missiles locked onto satellite navigation while flying through Ukrainian electronic warfare.

United24 Media, whose specialists regularly examine Kometa modules recovered from downed Shaheds, describes VNIIR-Progress as a bottleneck in Russia's production of strike systems. A refinery strike costs Russia export revenue; this one degrades the accuracy of guided weapons Moscow launches at Ukrainian cities, because the antenna line has no quick substitute inside Russia's component chain, per the outlet's assessment.

A second hit on the same plant in five weeks

The June 10 attack followed a now-familiar verification chain. Oleg Nikolayev, governor of Russia's Chuvash Republic, confirmed Cheboksary had been attacked and reported three injuries. The independent Russian outlet Astra traced the strike to the VNIIR-Progress premises using footage posted by residents, and the monitoring channel Exilenova+ identified the weapons as FP-5 Flamingos. Zelensky then claimed the strike, thanking the armed forces for hitting a plant that "supplies the occupier's army with components for drones and missiles."

The May 5 strike on the same complex sliced into the facade of a main workshop, satellite imagery analyzed by OSINT researchers showed, per Euromaidan Press. Astra analysts noted that Russia covered the entire site in camouflage netting and drone nets after that attack; the June 10 missiles arrived at low altitude five weeks later and hit the premises regardless. Politico wrote that a single Flamingo carries about a ton of explosives and can fly up to 3,000 kilometers, a reach that covers most of European Russia's defense industry from Ukrainian soil.

Production volume remains the open question. "I can't say how many Flamingos we produce a month, but there are enough of them in storage," Fire Point co-owner and chief constructor Denys Shtilierman told Politico in April. "Now, when we get an EU loan, they will fly in a flow."

From four antenna elements to 16

The Kometa is a controlled reception pattern antenna, or CRPA: an array that filters out interference and spoofed GPS and GLONASS signals so a weapon keeps its navigation fix under electronic attack. United24 Media, which examined modules recovered from downed Shaheds, reports the progression directly. Early Shaheds carried four-element arrays. Later versions moved to eight, 12 and 16 elements, each step harder to jam.

The arms race tilted against Ukraine in early 2025, when an upgraded Kometa version with new anti-jamming elements rendered existing Ukrainian electronic defense systems largely ineffective, Politico reported. Ukrainian engineers spent months developing spoofing techniques against it, and the strikes "have the potential to stop them from ever making it onto the battlefield," the outlet wrote.

Ukraine's General Staff says the plant also manufactures satellite receivers and navigation antennas for GLONASS, GPS and Galileo systems, which spreads the damage across glide bombs and other guided weapons beyond the Shahed line. United24 frames the logic as destroying the cause rather than the consequence: Russia can still launch Shaheds and Iskanders without fresh Kometa supply, but they become easier to divert with jamming. One Russian attack in May ran 30 hours and involved more than 1,500 drones and missiles, by United24's count, a load that fell on Ukrainian air defense crews who, per the same account, operated without pause.

The pattern: Kremniy El, Zelenograd, Cheboksary

The Cheboksary plant joins a list of Russian component factories struck this year. Storm Shadow missiles hit the Kremniy El microelectronics plant in Bryansk in early March, per United24, and a mid-May strike reached Zelenograd, the Moscow-region hub for Russian military electronics production. VNIIR-Progress has now been hit in May and June, and Kyiv Post notes the facility had been targeted repeatedly before that.

Zelensky described the operation as part of Ukraine's "long-range sanctions" campaign against Russia's military production base and energy sector, per Kyiv Post. Export controls were meant to keep Western navigation components out of Russian weapons and have leaked through transshipment since 2022; the missile version of the policy skips the customs problem.

The same June 10 wave carried the economic half of the doctrine. Rosneft's Kuibyshev refinery in Samara halted oil processing after the attack, Reuters reported via industry sources. With Syzran offline since May 21 and Novokuibyshevsk running at reduced throughput since April, all three plants in Rosneft's Samara refining hub are now degraded, The Guardian's war briefing noted. Ukraine's SBU separately hit the Vtorovo and Lobkovo oil pumping stations in Vladimir region, 700 kilometers from the front, and a fire broke out around the Afipsky refinery in Krasnodar. Russia's Defense Ministry said it intercepted 326 Ukrainian drones across 20 regions that night. It reported no missile interceptions.

The 71 percent problem on the R-280

One layer down from the component war sits the logistics war, and the numbers there have moved fast. Military cargo traffic on the R-280, the highway linking Rostov-on-Don to Melitopol, Mariupol and Crimea along the Azov coast, has fallen 71 percent in two weeks, Unmanned Systems Forces commander Robert Brovdi said. Ukrainian drivers' footage shows the road, which The Guardian reports has been nearly closed to civilian traffic since late May, littered with burnt-out trucks. Ukrainian operators now call it the highway of death.

Zelensky said on May 5 that strikes at 20-plus kilometers had doubled since March and quadrupled since February, and Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov later named the objective a "logistics lockdown," with extra funding routed to the most effective units. The Guardian's account names US-made Hornet drones, whose operators use AI assistance to identify truck traffic at ranges around 150 kilometers, alongside a new Ukrainian fixed-wing drone called Morrigan that launches from a slingshot or a rail. A Russian official quoted by Meduza described a "comprehensive remote mining system" of airdropped charges that detonate on movement. Traffic over the Chonhar bridge into Crimea was suspended this week after repeated strikes, said Vladimir Saldo, the Kremlin-installed governor of occupied Kherson.

$40 billion in year one, by Kyiv's count

Zelensky signed a decree establishing June 11 as the annual Day of the Unmanned Systems Forces, marking one year since the branch was stood up. In that first year, the USF struck Russian targets worth nearly $40 billion, Zelensky said in his evening address, a Ukrainian figure with no independent verification. Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrsky put separate numbers on the May tempo: nearly 180,000 verified targets hit by drone operators in one month, around 4,000 Shaheds neutralized, and a 1.5-to-1 Ukrainian production advantage in FPV drones, per Kyiv Post. Zelensky has set a production target of 600 drones and missiles per day.

"For the first time in the world, such a branch of the military was created, in Ukraine," Zelensky said, per The Guardian. The branch's targeting now runs in distance bands, from front-line kill zones through middle-strike logistics out to 200 kilometers to deep-strike industry beyond that, and Fire Point, a private company, builds the missile anchoring the deepest band. Shtilierman's April comments to Politico place the scaling constraint on European financing rather than engineering.

What to watch

Shahed teardowns will register the strike's effect first. Ukrainian electronics specialists routinely examine antenna modules recovered from downed airframes, per United24, so recovered arrays slipping back toward four or eight elements, after 12- and 16-element versions became standard, would mark a genuine supply break within weeks. Russia has already concentrated Shahed assembly in the Alabuga special economic zone, and antenna production could be dispersed the same way, into smaller sites that are harder to find and slower to run. On the Ukrainian side, Shtilierman tied higher Flamingo output to the EU loan he mentioned to Politico in April.

Moscow could also look abroad for CRPA supply, and the sanctions picture there is moving: the EU is preparing to add 14 mainland Chinese and Hong Kong companies to its list of firms banned from buying European goods over support for Russia's war effort, AFP reported this week. When Ukraine struck VNIIR-Progress a year earlier, some production sections halted but resumed quickly, per United24. Satellite imagery of the Cheboksary site over the coming weeks will show whether two Flamingo strikes in five weeks produced a longer stoppage.