Ukraine Reveals Improvised Tochka-U Strike Missile Fitted With FAB-250 Fragmentation Bomb.

Newly released photos from Russian sources show a Ukrainian Tochka-U missile fitted with a Soviet-FAB 250 bomb wrapped in a resin-based fragmentation jacket. The improvised warhead highlights how Ukraine keeps legacy missiles operational for deep strike missions despite limited stocks.

Russian sources published on social media, on November 25, 2025, new photographs showing an unexploded Ukrainian Tochka-U tactical ballistic missile whose standard 9N123F warhead was replaced by a Soviet FAB-250 aerial bomb wrapped in a resin-based fragmentation jacket. The wreckage, reportedly recovered on Russian-controlled territory, confirms in remarkable detail how Ukrainian engineers kept aging Tochka launchers in the fight once factory warheads became scarce in 2022.
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Ukrainian Tochka-U hybrid missile fitted with an improvised FAB-250 warhead, offering mobile, short-range strike capability out to roughly 120 kilometers with a dense fragmentation effect optimized against personnel, soft vehicles, and exposed logistics positions (Picture source: CSIS/ open source pictures).

The images reveal that the bomb, likely an FAB-250 M62 or similar OFAB-250T, was inserted into the original Tochka-U warhead space with its tail unit removed, then surrounded by a cylindrical shell packed with pre-formed steel fragments set in resin. In its standard form, the FAB-250 weighs about 250 kilograms with roughly 100 kilograms of high explosive, compared with the 9N123F warhead’s 482-kilogram body and approximately 160 kilograms of explosive filler. The Ukrainian modification trades some raw blast power for a very dense fragmentation effect tailored to infantry, soft vehicles, and exposed logistics nodes.

The FAB-250 M62 is a thin-walled, general-purpose bomb designed to combine blast overpressure with a wide fragment footprint, with open sources citing an explosive mass close to 100 kilograms and a typical lethal radius approaching 100 to 120 meters against exposed personnel. In its original air dropped role, a single nose fuze produces impact detonation and irregular high velocity fragments. Ukraine’s resin jacket effectively transforms it into a quasi pre-formed fragmentation warhead, likely generating more fragments than the 9N123F but with slightly lower explosive energy, a tradeoff that favors anti-personnel and anti-soft target missions over hardened infrastructure.

The host missile remains the 9K79 1 Tochka-U, NATO Scarab B, a single-stage solid-fuel tactical ballistic system developed by KBM Kolomna as a successor to the Luna M artillery rocket. With a launch weight of about 2,010 kilograms, maximum range near 120 kilometers, and a circular error probable of roughly 95 meters, Tochka-U was designed around a modular warhead family that included high-explosive fragmentation, cluster, nuclear, and specialized anti-radar options. Shifting from a 482-kilogram factory warhead to a lighter bomb plus jacket inevitably changes the missile’s mass and center of gravity, which can alter both range and accuracy, something Ukrainian technicians reportedly tried to compensate for by adjusting the thickness of the fragmentation sleeve.

The fuze arrangement underlines the improvisation: Tochka-U normally employs an electronic fuze to achieve airburst around 20 meters above ground, maximizing fragment dispersion. In the hybrid missile, investigators found an AVU ET mechanical impact fuze, standard for FAB series bombs and widely documented in Ukrainian ordnance guides. When the missile struck at a shallow angle, the nose fuze never sensed the proper deceleration vector, leaving the bomb undetonated and exposing the entire engineering solution to EOD teams and open source analysts.

Behind this field modification is a system with a long combat record. The original Tochka entered Soviet service in 1975 as a brigade-level asset replacing FROG 7 rockets, with Tochka-U introduced in 1989 after state trials and given improved range and accuracy. Tochka batteries have since seen action from Chechnya and Yemen to Syria and the wider Russo-Ukrainian conflict, where both Russia and Ukraine have used them against airfields, depots, and command posts.

Ukraine’s 19th Missile Brigade inherited Tochka-U after independence and began regenerating additional battalions after 2014, a process documented by Ukrainian officers and Western researchers. In the opening phase of the full-scale invasion, Tochka-U became one of Kyiv’s few tools for striking deep targets, including the March 2022 Berdiansk port attack that destroyed the Russian landing ship Saratov and forced the Black Sea Fleet to pull valuable amphibious assets out of range.

By early 2022, however, daily firing cycles were exhausting Ukraine’s limited stock of complete missiles. Ukrainian accounts indicate that technical personnel began examining surplus missile bodies stored without warheads since the nuclear drawdown of the 1990s and proved they could be safely mated with conventional aerial bombs. The result was a small-scale wartime production line of hybrid Tochka rounds that some observers have labeled Franken missiles, combining Soviet era rocket motors with whatever FAB or OFAB bodies could be pulled from depots.

The newly documented FAB 250-based configuration appears optimized for area suppression, with a lighter payload compensated by massive fragmentation and a possible marginal increase in range due to reduced overall weight. A previously reported variant used an FAB-500T, roughly doubling explosive mass and prioritizing blast overpressure against hardened positions, aircraft on aprons, or critical fuel and ammunition storage. Together, these two fields designed warheads to recreate the original Soviet concept of a family of tailored Tochka payloads, now driven by battlefield necessity rather than formal design bureaus.

The hybrid Tochka-U sits at the intersection of artillery and airpower. It gives Ukrainian commanders a way to deliver a single, large high-explosive effect out to 100 kilometers and beyond from road mobile, NBC-protected launchers, without exposing scarce combat aircraft to Russian long-range air defenses. In that sense, it mirrors Russia’s own practice of equipping FAB series bombs with UMPK glide kits, but from the opposite direction. Instead of giving bombs wings, Ukraine is giving them rockets.

The adaptation is not without risk because of improvised aerodynamics, non-optimal fuzing, and the absence of modern terminal guidance, all work against precision and reliability. Yet set against a backdrop of ammunition shortages, intense Russian use of glide bombs against Ukrainian cities, and Ukraine’s broader push toward new indigenous strike systems, the hybrid Tochka-U illustrates a defining dynamic of the war. Ukraine is buying time and range by squeezing new life out of old hardware, turning museum-age missiles and Cold War gravity bombs into a still-relevant deep strike capability.