In under a month, precise, long-range rockets from the US have delivered Ukraine some striking battlefield wins against the Russian army, deep behind the frontline.
Last week Kyiv’s forces used the long-awaited Himars — high-mobility artillery rocket systems — for a strike described by one official as “jewel-like” on the Antonivsky bridge over the Dnipro river in Russian-occupied territory east of Kherson.
The attack made the 1.4km-long link unusable for heavy military trucks, disconnecting supply routes to the the occupied southern city from Crimea, the peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014.
Another Himars strike over the weekend hit a train carrying supplies and soldiers from Crimea to the Kherson region. It killed 80 Russian soldiers and wounded 200, according to Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s interior ministry. The railway line could take weeks to repair, a British official said.
These strikes are a few examples of the pain that the truck-borne rocket launchers, with a range of around 80km, have inflicted on the Russian army across the battlefield. With them Ukraine has taken out more than 100 high-value targets, including command posts, ammunition depots, air defence sites, nodes for radar and communications, and long-range artillery positions, according to a senior US defence official.
“The word Himars has become almost synonymous with the word justice for our country, and the Ukrainian defence forces will do everything to ensure that the occupiers experience more and more painful losses every week thanks to these very effective systems,” said Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy in his daily evening address on Tuesday.
Four additional American units arrived this week, bringing the total of Himars in Ukrainian hands to 20. On Monday the US approved the delivery of more Himars ammunition and Germany supplied three similar rocket systems with a range of about 70km.
But Kyiv says it needs more of the advanced weapons faster — it asked for at least 50 in March, according to a person familiar with the matter — as well as more ammunition to use them at the tempo they want to.
The limited supply has led Ukraine to focus on wrenching back control of Kherson, which fell to the Russians in early March, rather than attempt to regain ground in the eastern region of Donbas, where Ukrainian forces are outnumbered and outgunned, according to three officials briefed on discussions.
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The Ukrainians have used Himars to take out weapons caches and make it difficult for Russian forces to be resupplied in Kherson and deny them the firepower superiority that has helped them advance in eastern Ukraine. Source: FT
