A ruthless double-tap barrage by Ukrainian rockets may have killed or wounded dozens of Russian troops in southern Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Oblast on or just before Saturday.
Worse is coming. The administration of U.S. Pres. Joe Biden has finally given Ukraine permission to use its best U.S.-made munitions against targets inside Russia.
A Ukrainian drone winging over Tavria, 15 miles south of the front line in Zaporizhzhia, initiated the bloody chain of events on Saturday when it spotted a large group of Russian troops crowded around their vehicles on the edge of a treeline.
At least three M30/31 rockets, fired by the Ukrainian army’s American-made High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, streaked down. The blasts killed or wounded many of the Russians.
Cruelly, the Ukrainian gunners held their fire until the Russians were loading the wounded in trucks. A fourth round—possibly an M30 packed with 400 grenade-sized submunitions—exploded among the survivors.
“Perfect hit!” roared Yurii Butusov, a Ukrainian war correspondent.
The carnage was shocking but purposeful. While the Russians have concentrated their forces in Donetsk Oblast in eastern Ukraine and Kursk Oblast in western Russia, they’re sparing just enough troops and equipment to increase the pressure on the front line in Zaporizhzhia.
According to the Ukrainian Center for Defense Strategies, the Kremlin aims to advance a couple of miles in Zaporizhzhia in order to capture—by March—the village of Temyrivka, which lies at the juncture of Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovsk and Donetsk Oblasts.
The Ukrainians have also concentrated their forces in Donetsk and Kursk, but can disrupt Russia’s southern build-up with targeted rocket strikes.
It’s a bloody tradition in Russia’s 33-month wider war on Ukraine for large numbers of Russian troops to gather out in the open within range of Ukraine’s HIMARS—and for those HIMARS to blast the Russians with GPS-guided rockets. These mass-casualty strikes have killed and wounded hundreds of Russians in the past year.
The strikes are sure to escalate. According to The New York Times, the Biden administration has authorized Ukraine to use ex-American Army Tactical Missile Systems rockets, each ranging as far as 190 miles with as many as 950 submunitions, against targets on Russian soil in and around Kursk. “Missiles will speak for themselves,” warned Ukrainian Pres. Volodymyr Zelensky.
For months, Ukraine has been begging for permission to use ATACMS inside Russia. Biden didn’t acquiesce until after North Korea sent thousands of troops to join the fighting in Kursk, significantly escalating what is increasingly a global war.
How much damage the ATACMS might inflict depends on the disposition of Russian and North Korean forces in Kursk, how many ATACMS Ukraine has left in its inventory—and how many more of the rockets Biden might send to Ukraine before U.S. President-elect Donald Trump takes office in January.
Trump could throttle, or even end, U.S. aid to Ukraine. Trump’s possible pivot away from Ukraine and toward Russia may end up doing what Russian forces have so far failed to do: end the mass-casualty rocket strikes on big groups of Russian troops.
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