Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu has instructed the military to prioritize the destruction of Ukraine’s long-range missiles and artillery weapons, the Defense Ministry said on Monday.
Kiev reports having carried out a series of successful attacks on 30 Russian logistics and munitions centers, using various multiple rocket launch systems recently supplied by the West.
New missiles sent by US to Ukraine cause problems for Russia
There is a new and possibly very significant factor in the conflict in Ukraine: the ability of Ukrainians to use newly deployed Western systems to target Russian command posts, logistics centers and munitions depots located far beyond the front lines.
Last week, huge explosions occurred in several occupied areas in the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions. The available evidence, provided by satellite imagery and Western analysts, is that this targeting has been very effective.
For months, the Ukrainian military has begged Western partners for long-range precision artillery and missile systems. Now they have these resources, which are being deployed to considerable effect in the south and east of the country.
The Ukrainian military did not give details, but Vadim Denysenko, a senior official at the Interior Ministry, said on Wednesday that in the last two weeks, “above all, and thanks to the weapons that Ukraine received, we managed to destroy about twenty warehouses with weapons and stockpiles of fuel and lubricants. This will certainly affect the intensity of fire” that the Russians can mobilize, he said.
The best of the advanced missile systems is the US-supplied HIMARS, which is a mobile unit that can multi-launch guided missiles, but the Ukrainians also received M777 guns from the US and Canada, and long-range Caesar guns from France.
In addition, the UK has committed to providing M270 long-range missile launchers (MLRS), which are more powerful than HIMARS, but it is unknown when Ukraine will complete its training and deploy the system.
The versatility of the HIMARS is in its name: High Mobility Artillery Rocket System. Its mobility makes the system more difficult to hit, and it can be manned by just eight soldiers. Missiles supplied to Ukraine have a range of 70 to 80 kilometers, and their GPS guidance system makes them extremely accurate.
As Mick Ryan, a military analyst and former Australian Major General, described it: “It is used to destroy important communication nodes, command posts, airfields and logistics facilities.”
In this way, senior Russian officers are especially vulnerable. The accuracy of HIMARS also means that Ukrainians can worry less about civilian casualties. The guided missiles are accurate to within two to three meters, two defense officials told CNN, allowing the Ukrainians to use far less ammunition to hit targets from a distance.
HIMARS appears to have been used in a massive attack on a warehouse in the town of Nova Kakhovka, in the Kherson region, on Monday night. The attack triggered secondary explosions and caused widespread damage, according to satellite images analyzed by the CNN . The images still showed the accuracy of the attack, which left only a small crater.
Local pro-Russian officials said parts of a HIMARS rocket had been recovered, and that the serial numbers matched the weaponry.
There were also large explosions in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions, triggering multiple detonations. The same happened in Shakhtarsk in Donetsk and in the Kherson region over the weekend, as well as near Melitopol in Zaporizhzhia last week.
In all, it appears that around ten targets behind Russian front lines were hit in July, most of them at least 40 kilometers away – a distance at which the old Tochka-U missiles would have struggled to pinpoint.
The Ukrainians have also been firing the HIMARS at night, making locating and attacking the missile launcher more difficult for the Russians. Russian forces have struggled to fight at night since the start of the conflict, and the Ukrainians still use this aspect to their advantage.
Source: CNN Brasil
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