Claims about strikes deep inside Russia are cheap. Verification is not. This week the satellites caught up with two of them, and the pictures are unusually specific about what Ukrainian drones actually hit.

At Millerovo air base in Rostov Oblast, imagery published by the OSINT account Dnipro OSINT and reported by the Ukrainian outlet Militarnyi shows an ammunition depot and the base’s technical and maintenance facility completely destroyed, and two radars damaged. At Sochi airport, roughly 500 kilometres to the southeast, a separate strike on 4 September left a Ka-52 and a Mi-28 destroyed on the ramp and an Mi-8 damaged.

Neither result was announced by Moscow. Russian authorities have said nothing publicly about either attack.

What the imagery shows at Millerovo

Millerovo sits about four kilometres northwest of the town of the same name, close enough to the Ukrainian border to be a natural staging field and far enough back that Russia once treated it as safe. It has hosted the 31st Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment on Su-30SM fighters, and earlier deployments of Su-25 attack aircraft. Ukrainian officials describe it as a key node for frontline aviation supporting operations in the east and south.

The satellite pictures do not show wrecked aircraft. They show something arguably more useful. The base’s TECh — the technical and maintenance facility where aircraft are serviced — is gone, along with an ammunition depot. Two radars took damage: an RSP-27 precision approach radar, which is what lets aircraft recover to the field in poor weather, and a Nebo-SV early warning radar.

Destroy an aircraft and Russia loses one aircraft. Destroy the maintenance hall, the ammunition it drops and the radar that brings it home in weather, and the whole field slows down.

This is not the first time. Millerovo has been struck repeatedly since the full-scale invasion began, including drone attacks in December 2023 and July 2025.

The drone doing the work

The weapon named in the reporting is the FP-1, built by the Ukrainian company Fire Point. It has quietly become one of the most consequential aircraft of this war, and almost nobody outside the specialist press could pick it out of a line-up.

The FP-1 carries a warhead of 60 to 120 kilograms depending on configuration, with a documented range of 1,600 kilometres. Fire Point says an upgraded model shown this year reaches as far as 2,700 kilometres. Ukraine’s military credits FP-1 strikes with more than half of its long-range drone missions against Russian targets, hitting ammunition depots, oil refineries, radar stations and air defence systems.

What makes that arithmetic uncomfortable for Russia is the exchange rate. A long-range one-way drone is cheap. A hardened maintenance facility, a stock of aviation ordnance and a pair of ground radars are not, and none of them can be replaced in a week.

Sochi: two attack helicopters gone

The 4 September strike produced a different kind of result. Satellite and visual evidence reviewed afterwards identified damage to Russian military aircraft parked at Sochi’s airport in Krasnodar Krai: a Ka-52 attack helicopter and a Mi-28 attack helicopter destroyed, and an Mi-8 transport damaged, in the airport’s military helicopter parking area.

Losing a Ka-52 and a Mi-28 in one night is a genuinely expensive evening. Both are frontline attack helicopters, both are in short supply relative to demand, and both were sitting in the open on a civilian airfield.

Sochi has been on the target list before. Ukraine’s Defence Intelligence directorate said an October 2023 attack hit a helicopter parking area in the airport’s Adler district, and an August 2025 strike set fire to a nearby oil depot. The airport also handles civilian traffic, which is the uncomfortable part: an international resort airport is now a place where attack helicopters park next to airliners.

Background on Fire Point, the Ukrainian company behind the FP-1 long-range strike drone.

Why verification matters

Both sides in this war announce more than they achieve. What changed over the past two years is that commercial satellite imagery and a network of open-source analysts now provide an independent check, usually within days.

That check cuts both ways. It confirms strikes that Moscow does not acknowledge, and it quietly deflates Ukrainian claims that do not survive contact with a satellite pass. In this case the imagery supports the specific claims made: named buildings, named radar types, named helicopter types, at named locations.

It is worth remembering that all of this rests on open-source analysis rather than official confirmation from either government. That is the standard of evidence available, and for now it is the best one there is.

Sources: Dnipro OSINT satellite imagery; Militarnyi; The Defence Blog.