For the Russian Federation, bombs with UMPK kits, which allow them to be dropped at a distance of 50-70 km from the target, have become one of the main means of air damage.
Starting with the installation of the kit on the FAB-500, the enemy later switched to a more successful design from the FAB-250 and adapted these kits for installation on the RBK-500 cassette, as well as on the super-powerful FAB-1500.
Currently, it is already known where exactly the enemy produces UMPK kits – in the city of Korolev near Moscow, 475 km from the border with Ukraine. It is even known that machines from China and Japan are used for this purpose. However, the volume of production remains undisclosed.
But, as RKB-Ukraine reports, citing its own sources in the Ukrainian special services, the planned production volume of all modified aerial bombs (KAB) in the Russian Federation, of which UMPKs are the most widespread, is 10,000 units for 2024. At the same time, there are questions regarding these data.
Such a volume of production means that 27.4 adjusted aerial bombs should be conventionally produced per day, but the publication also notes that at the level of May 2023, the enemy was already using about 25 corrected aerial bombs (CAB) of various types per day on average, which also includes UMPK. But currently, this indicator is already 60 KAB, sometimes up to a hundred per day.
Thus, there is a certain discrepancy between the production estimate and what the enemy is already showing. Because even an average usage rate of 60 units means the need to produce 21.9 thousand per year. At the same time, plans to increase their production have already been reported many times in Moscow.
It is also possible to estimate the number of aircraft in the form of Su-34 front-line bombers, which are necessary to drop such a number of KABs per day. Taking into account that the Su-34 usually takes only two rounds of ammunition, this is only 30 sorties per day for the current average level of use of air defense systems. Although the Su-34 can carry a larger number, cases of loading four units have already been observed.
Taking into account the known number of Su-34s of about 100 units by 2022, minus the known losses of several dozen, as well as the pace of their production (according to approximate estimates, six Su-34s for the whole of 2023), for the Russian Federation this parameter is more than achievable even under the conditions of one sortie per front-line bomber per day.
