Sweden did something to the Russian army that has locked up its front lines, and it did it not with a landing or an air campaign, but with a single weapon handed to Ukraine.
That weapon stopped Russia’s most trusted move, advancing with columns of steel-plated armor to break open the front.
And the place where it stopped that move was exactly the ground Putin had staked everything on taking, the Donbas fortress belt, that chain of fortified cities running from Kostyantynivka to Kramatorsk.
[music] The weapon’s name is the Bonus shell.
It’s fired from 35 km away, rises up, and settles silently onto the very top of a Russian tank, the thinnest part of its armor.
An anti-tank missile comes at you head-on.
You see [music] it, you run.
The Bonus shell comes from above, and by the time you notice it, it’s already inside you.
These days, the Russian tank driver isn’t watching the tree line.
He’s watching the sky.
>> [music] >> So, how did a small Swedish shell reverse the armored superiority of an entire army? Before we start, a small request.
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Now, let’s begin.
In the summer of 2026, Putin’s plan was simple.
To crush his way through the Donbas fortress belt, the chain of fortified cities running from Sloviansk to Kramatorsk, from Druzhkivka to Kostyantynivka, with columns of steel-plated armor.
To achieve this, Putin had deployed approximately 300,000 Russian troops to the Donbas, both directly and indirectly.
And for years, Ukraine’s biggest problem in stopping this kind of armored column was the limits of the weapons in its hands.
Javelins, NLAW’s, AT2 minefields, kamikaze drones, even leftover Soviet-era Krasnapol rounds.
Each did its job to a degree, but none of them fully solved the problem of limited range and a narrow target spectrum.
The problem was this, when you hit the lead vehicle of a tank battalion, the convoy stops.
The rear vehicles maneuver back and wait, and the crews who’ve bought some time pop their smoke mortars and hide.
In moments like these, the entire chain of classic anti-tank guidance falls apart.
If your eye leaves the target, if the round’s satellite guidance drifts, or if the radar directing the shot loses to the weather, then even if the first shot succeeds, the second and third targets have already abandoned their positions.
In other words, a single moment of blindness means missing the whole opportunity.
Ukraine did not have a weapon that could strike far, make its own decision, and never blink.
The Swedish-made BONUS shell steps in at exactly this impasse.
That’s why in 2026, as Russian armored columns advanced toward the fortress belt, something new was waiting for them from 30 km back and from above.
The BONUS shell isn’t a plain artillery round.
It’s a small reconnaissance killer platform that glides through the air carrying two smart submunitions.
That’s where its name comes from, the Bofors nutating shell, a round jointly built by Sweden’s Bofors and France’s Nexter.
And since Bofors heavy weapons division was bought in 2005, it now sits under BAE Systems.
When the shell leaves the barrel, a standard NATO propellant charge and a base bleed unit give it a stable ballistic path out to 35 km.
Once the ascent phase ends, the shell separates and two independent sensor-fused submunitions are ejected.
155 uses a parachute.
That’s the first sign distinguishing the BONUS shell from it.
The discs spin rapidly, sweeping an area of about 32,000 square meters.
Under each disc, there’s a multi-band infrared sensor and a laser radar.
These compare the vehicles they detect against a target database programmed into them.
They recognize a T-72, a T-90, a BMP-3, or an ammunition-laden supply truck, [music] while ignoring an ordinary off-road vehicle, a tractor, or a pile of scrap.
The moment the target is confirmed, the forged copper cone inside the submunition detonates and flattens within microseconds, forming an explosively formed penetrator, an EFP for short.
This penetrating core descends at very high speed at a perfectly vertical angle onto the top of the tank.
Because even on the Russian army’s most advanced tanks, the T-90M included, the top armor thickness generally doesn’t exceed 45 millimeters of steel.
Russia could stall waves of Javelins and kamikaze drones with smoke mortars, but against the BONUS shell, which picks out roof armor with infrared and laser radar scanning, neither cover nor smoke helps.
When the EFP pierces the armor, it reaches the ammunition rack or the engine compartment beneath, often turning the vehicle into a ball of flame in an instant.
Let’s trace this weapon’s tracks in Ukraine from the start.
According to open sources, its first confirmed kill was recorded in the summer of 2022.
A drone filmed from kilometers away a strike descending onto the very top of a Russian Pantsir S1 air defense vehicle and detonating inside it.
The signature not of an anti-tank missile, but of an EFP coming from above.
The irony was this.
The Pantsir’s job was precisely to protect against drones, yet the shot that hit it was recorded by a drone.
In the period that followed, this signature multiplied along the front.
In one of the striking examples relayed by Ukrainian sources in Donetsk [music] on the lines that are today at the center of the fortress belt battle, three BMP-2s, known for their weak top armor, were targeted.
In the footage, [music] the turrets suddenly separate from the hulls and are flung into the air with a nearly symmetrical hole the size of a saucer, 10 to 12 cm across, left at the exact center of each turret.
The mark of a vertical kinetic strike coming straight down from above, not from the side.
In another incident, a Russian headquarters convoy was hit.
The recordings showed neither a missile trail nor a drone, only explosions that suddenly glided in from above, buried themselves in metal, and detonated.
Today, as Russia piles its armor toward Kramatorsk and Kostiantynivka, Ukraine is concentrating this kind of smart artillery and deep strike in exactly those directions.
Indeed, photographs of submunitions later recovered on the ground confirmed everything.
French-made, winged, [music] three-lens sensor heads, EFP plates, little discs resembling small satellites.
Russia first tried the classic counter-battery method, but by the time the Zoo Park 1M radar tracked the howitzer’s firing trace and located the position, the Archer or Caesar that had fired was long gone because these platforms can pack up within 40 seconds of a shot and fall back hundreds of meters.
By the time the radar made its second scan, the new round was already in the air.
This shoot and scoot profile renders even Russia’s numerically superior artillery useless.
>> [music] >> Active protection systems can’t fully answer this threat, either.
Russia’s newest system, the Arena-M, is being fitted to T-90Ms and claims to cover every angle, including top attack.
But there are two problems.
First, the system has been tested in combat almost not at all.
Experts are doubtful whether it would really work against a strike coming from directly overhead at a very high angle.
Second, [music] and perhaps more important, a tank fitted with Arena M can’t also have a drone cage, the cope cage used against low-flying FPV drones added to it.
So, Russia is forced to choose between uncertain protection against smart top attack rounds and proven protection against FPV drones.
>> [music] >> The more advanced Afghanit system, developed for the T-14 Armata, is all but absent from the field.
>> [music] >> Reactive armor plates can’t be placed on the tank roof, either, because of weight and ergonomics.
On armored personnel carriers, the situation is even worse.
The roof of a BMP-3 is 15 mm, that of a BTR-82 only seven.
The EFP cuts through these like butter.
And here, Russia’s real dilemma emerges.
Its modern tank inventory, the T-90M, the T-80BVM, is already limited.
The Soviet-era T-62 and T-55 hulls pulled from storage can’t withstand a top-down strike at all.
A bonus shell costs around $110,000.
>> [music] >> If you destroy two tanks and one armored recovery vehicle in three shots, Russia’s loss exceeds five to six million dollars, a cost balance of roughly 15 to 20 times in Ukraine’s favor.
And here is the result of all this on the front.
>> [music] >> In the summer of 2026, Putin threw his full weight onto the fortress belt.
With the offensive he launched in August 2025, he managed to enter Kostyantynivka by June 2026, but he missed his commanders’ end-of-May target, failed to take the train station, and Ukraine cleared out the infiltration groups in the southwest of the city.
Further west, even at Pokrovsk, which fell in early 2026, he couldn’t widen the offensive.
Ukraine pushed back the Russian attacks again and again.
In fact, in February 2026, for the first time since 2023, it retook more territory than Russia captured.
Because massed armored assault, thanks to the combination of top attack munitions and a wall of drones, had become a move that now loses far more than it gains.
That’s why Russia largely abandoned the big armored maneuver and was forced into a slow, bloody, and inefficient infantry infiltration war.
When an armored column moves into the open, it now fears not only the Javelin teams, but also a howitzer battery on the back of a truck 30 km to the rear.
The fortress belt still stands.
Kostyantynivka is contested, but has not fallen.
And one of the gears that slowed that steel wave is Sweden’s smart artillery descending from the sky.
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Because now we’re coming to another big part of the story.
Why the bonus shell isn’t a single round on its own, but the sharp tip of an entire Swedish war network.
To understand the bonus shell, you first have to look at the hand that fires it, the Archer.
>> [music] >> Sweden’s self-propelled howitzer is a master of the shoot and scoot logic.
It moves into position within minutes, fires its salvo, and leaves the area before the enemy can respond.
Part of what makes the bonus shell so lethal is precisely this.
You fire the smart round from a platform that can escape without leaving a trace.
But the Archer is only one node in a much larger network Sweden has built up for Ukraine.
For decades, Swedish defense doctrine has rested on a single idea.
Beat a numerically superior enemy with technology and integration.
This few but smart philosophy, developed against the Soviets during the Cold War, is exactly what Ukraine needs today.
That’s why every system Stockholm sends is part of a single interconnected network.
CV90 armored combat vehicles, with a priority production run of 35 of the newest version, and Leopard-based Stridsvagn 122 tanks weave the ground force together.
RBS70 air defense, combat boat 90 vessels, and anti-ship missiles cover different layers.
And at the very top are the eyes.
The ASC 890 airborne early warning aircraft and the Giraffe radar families form the brain that tells all these systems when and where to fire.
Sweden sends not individual weapons, but a network of systems that talk to one another.
And the headline of 2026? Gripen.
In May 2026, Sweden announced its largest aid package since the start of the war.
A package of roughly 2 and 1/2 billion dollars.
Under it, Sweden is donating 16 Gripen C and D fighter jets from its own inventory.
The first deliveries are expected in early 2027.
Ukraine is also acquiring 20 of the newest Gripen E and F jets, with an ultimate goal of a fleet of 100 to 150 aircraft.
The deal was signed on June 30th, 2026.
The most striking thing about the Gripen is this.
It was designed to take off from highways, short runways, and improvised sites.
That is, [music] for exactly this war scenario.
It could fundamentally change Ukraine’s air picture against Russian guided bombs and air strikes.
>> [music] >> In short, the Bonus shell is only the most visible tip of this network.
The real power lies in the parts being linked to one another.
And this cooperation isn’t one-way, either.
At the 2026 Aurora exercise, Ukrainian drone teams, who have been fighting for 4 years now served as instructors to Swedish units.
In the end, the Bonus shell isn’t just a round, it’s a doctrine breaker.
>> [music] >> It carries the sharp tip of Swedish-French engineering to Kyiv and strikes Russian armor doctrine at exactly its weak point, the top.
Remember that picture from the opening? The fortress belt that Putin threw his full weight against did not fall this year.
The steel wave slammed into a wall where weapons like this were waiting.
Unless the tank roof is thickened, unless active protection systems can genuinely answer a perfectly vertical strike, or unless sensor rings come to reliably cover the sky above as well, Moscow won’t be able to prevent these losses and the rate of production can’t keep up with the rate of loss.
But let’s be honest, no single round turns this war around on its own.
Russia still has air power, electronic warfare, and numerical superiority.
The front is largely drone dominated and the fighting in the fortress belt goes on.
What the Bonus shell does isn’t a magical victory.
It’s making Russia’s most trusted move, crushing its way through with steel, increasingly impossible and helping to stop that steel wave.
And in doing so, it binds Ukraine tightly to Sweden’s technology against numbers philosophy.
That [music] is, to the age of smart artillery and the integrated war network.
On the plains of Donbas, with every EFP impact, the protective myth of Russian armor grows a few millimeters thinner and Putin’s “I’ll win with steel” calculation collapses a little more.
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Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
