Ukraine expands deep-strike campaign with Storm Shadow missile hit on Russian chemical site.

Ukraine’s General Staff said a combined missile and air operation struck the Bryansk Chemical Plant on Oct. 21, using air-launched Storm Shadow cruise missiles that Kyiv says penetrated Russian air defenses. 

The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said late on October 21, 2025, that a combined missile and air operation struck the Bryansk Chemical Plant inside Russia, describing the site as a producer of gunpowder, explosives, and rocket-fuel components. Ukrainian officials said air-launched Storm Shadow cruise missiles penetrated Russian air defenses; Moscow acknowledged missile and drone activity over Bryansk but claimed no damage. The battle damage assessment is ongoing, but the message is clear: Kyiv is again willing and able to reach deep into the Russian defense production chain.
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Storm Shadow/SCALP-EG is a stealthy air-launched cruise missile with terrain-following guidance and a penetrator warhead, striking hardened targets 250+ km away from Ukraine’s Su-24M (Picture source: MBDA).

Storm Shadow, known in France as SCALP-EG, is a low-observable, turbojet-powered, deep-strike weapon optimized for pre-planned attacks on hardened, high-value fixed targets. Weighing roughly 1,300 kilograms and measuring 5.1 meters, it uses a blended navigation suite combining INS, GPS and terrain-reference updates to ride low under radar. In the terminal phase, an imaging infrared seeker matches the target scene to a stored picture to achieve pinpoint accuracy, driving a tandem blast-penetrator warhead through reinforced structures with selectable fusing for airburst, impact, or delayed penetration. Range is officially “in excess of 250 km,” giving the launching aircraft standoff freedom beyond most medium-range SAM envelopes.

Ukraine integrates Storm Shadow/SCALP on its Su-24M Fencer strike aircraft, a swing-wing platform well suited to lofting heavy standoff munitions. Public imagery and official posts since 2023 have shown Su-24s carrying and firing the weapon, confirming both the airframe adaptation and the mission profile Kyiv favors for deep-strike: low-level ingress by the launcher, terrain-hugging cruise by the missile, and terminal scene-matching to finish.

How much and when did Kyiv receive this capability? London publicly confirmed the donation of Storm Shadow on May 11, 2023, making the United Kingdom the first Western state to transfer a long-range cruise missile to Ukraine; numbers were not disclosed. Paris followed at the NATO Vilnius summit on July 11, 2023, with an initial tranche described by a French diplomatic source as about 50 SCALP missiles from national stocks. In January 2024, President Emmanuel Macron said a further batch of roughly 40 SCALP-EGs and “hundreds of bombs” would be delivered in the following weeks. Britain’s April 2024 aid top-up also explicitly included “additional Storm Shadow strike missiles,” signaling continued supply despite stock pressures.

Will more come? The UK and France announced in July 2025 that they are ordering new Storm Shadow/SCALP missiles and restarting production lines at MBDA while advancing their next-generation FC/ASW replacement program. For Ukraine, this matters: renewed production means replenishment pathways for donors and a stronger political signal that Europe intends to sustain a deep-strike pipeline rather than let inventories atrophy.

Operationally, the Bryansk strike aligns with how Storm Shadow is meant to be used: to blind, choke, or shock the enemy’s sustainment by hitting infrastructure nodes that are hard to relocate and hard to repair quickly. Against a complex Russian air defense network, the missile’s survivability rests on long-range standoff, low-altitude flight, and a terminal profile designed to defeat point defenses and penetrate hardened roofs and blast doors. When paired with simultaneous drone activity or other munitions, as Ukraine described on Oct. 21, Storm Shadow helps complicate defensive targeting cycles and preserves scarce Ukrainian aircraft by minimizing exposure.

Western policy on cross-border strikes has evolved since 2023, with debates in London and Paris over how far Kyiv can take donated long-range weapons. By mid-2024, British officials were signaling shifting boundaries, and political leaders avoided foreclosing Storm Shadow’s use inside Russia outright. Each successful deep-strike inside the Russian industrial heartland tightens pressure on Moscow’s war economy and tests allied red lines on escalation management, while also reinforcing Europe’s decision to restart production of long-range strike missiles.