A senior US defense official said on Friday that Ukrainian forces are having a “big success” using an advanced missile system supplied by the United States to target Russian command posts.
The Ukrainians used High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) to target Kremlin positions in their battle for the eastern region of the country known as Donbass.
“Because it is such an accurate and longer range system, the Ukrainians are able to carefully select targets that would undermine Russia’s efforts in a more systematic way, certainly than they could with short-range artillery systems,” the official told reporters.
Ukrainian forces are still in the early days of operating the HIMARS systems—four of which the United States has already sent to the former Soviet country and four others pledged late last month—that only a handful of Ukrainian forces can operate after a briefing. Training course.
HIMARS, with a range of about 40 miles, gave the Ukrainians the ability to hit distant targets with greater accuracy than they had previously been able to when using short-range artillery.
“What you see is that the Ukrainians are actually systematically picking targets and then hitting them with precision, thus presenting this precise method of weakening the Russian capability,” the official said.
“I see that they can continue to use this throughout the Donbass.”
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