A Ukrainian Cruise Missile Blew Up That Russian Sub From The Inside

The Ukrainian Storm Shadow cruise missile that knocked out the Russian Black Sea Fleet’s submarine Rostov-on-Don in a nighttime raid on the fleet’s anchorage in Sevastopol, in occupied Crimea on Sept. 13, didn’t just damage the Kilo-class boat in its drydock—it blew it up from the inside.

Photos depicting the submarine’s wreckage that appeared online on Monday tell a clear story. The outward-curling metal at the Storm Shadow’s impact point, amidships on the 240-foot, 3,100-ton Rostov-on-Don, indicates the missile punched through the nine-year-old vessel’s hull before exploding.

This was by design. British firm BAE Systems specifically developed the Storm Shadow’s 880-pound Bomb Royal Ordnance Augmented Charge warhead for destroying hardened targets such as underground bunkers. But the two-warhead, “tandem” fit obviously works equally well against ships.

The Ukrainian air force and navy have other deep-strike weapons with the range—just under 200 miles—to hit Sevastopol from inside Ukrainian lines. The navy’s Harpoon and Neptune ground-launched anti-ship missiles in their land-attack modes, for example. Or the air force’s huge S-200 air-defense missiles, which the Ukrainians now deploy in a surface-strike mode.

But planners in Kyiv wanted to destroy warships. Specifically, warships resting inside the drydock belonging to the 13th Ship Repair Plant in Sevastopol. The layers of concrete and steel the Ukrainian munitions would have to contend with practically begged for a tandem warhead.

And while the 2,900-pound Storm Shadow—which the Ukrainian air force has integrated with its Sukhoi Su-24M bombers—isn’t the only missile in the Ukrainian inventory with a tandem warhead, it might be the best.

It works like this: when a low-flying Storm Shadow—guided by a combination of GPS, terrain-matching and infrared imaging—finally strikes its target, a fuze in the nose first triggers a small shaped-charge warhead. That warhead blasts a hole in the outermost layer of earth, concrete or metal—clearing the way for the missile’s second warhead to plunge inside the target before exploding.

“This warhead design allows cruise missiles to achieve the degree of hard-target penetration formerly only possible using laser-guided gravity bombs,” explained Fabian Hoffmann, a University of Oslo proliferation researcher. “As such, Storm Shadow constitutes an incredibly effective weapon against hardened targets, if it can be brought to its target.”

The Kremlin insisted it would repair and return to service the two warships that burned inside the Sevastopol drydock on Sept. 13. But the damage the Storm Shadow inflicted on Rostov-on-Don makes a mockery of that claim. As dramatic as the outward damage on the submarine appears to be—the damage on the inside of the boat clearly is much, much worse.

Rostov-on-Don is wrecked beyond repair, making it the first submarine the Russian or Soviet navy has lost in combat since World War II.