Ukrainian forces are having “great success” using a US-supplied advanced missile system to target Russian command posts, a senior US defense official said on Friday.
The Ukrainians have used the advanced High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) to attack Kremlin positions in its battle for the country’s eastern region known as Donbass.
“Because it’s such a precise, longer-range system, the Ukrainians are able to carefully select targets that will undermine Russia’s efforts in a more systematic way, certainly than they could with shorter-range artillery systems ” the official told reporters.
Ukrainian forces are still in the early days of operating the HIMARS systems — four of which the U.S. has already deployed to the former Soviet country and four more promised late last month — as only a handful of Ukrainian soldiers can operate them after a short training course.
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HIMARS, which has a range of about 40 miles, gave the Ukrainians the ability to hit distant targets with greater accuracy than they had been able to before when using shorter-range artillery.
“What you’re seeing is that the Ukrainians are actually systematically selecting targets and then precisely hitting them, thus providing this, you know, precise method of degrading Russian capabilities,” the official said.
“I can see that they can continue to use this throughout Donbass.”
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