U.S. administration officials have said that Russian forces have moved 90 percent of the aircraft conducting glide bomb strikes away from Russian airspace from airfields within range of the Storm Shadow and ATACMS missiles.
The U.S. think tank Institute for the Study of War says there are 16 air bases within range of Ukrainian ATACMS in Russia, and while the think tank confirms the redeployment of Russian aircraft, it insists that this does not diminish the importance of allowing Ukraine to use ATACMS against hundreds of other Russian military objects, nor the apparently small number of ATACMS that the United States has provided.
Ukrainian forces are using locally-made long-range strike systems to strike some of the objects beyond the range of the Himars. And while they are effective, they have certain vulnerabilities, experts say.
Fabian Rene Hoffmann, a PhD student at the University of Oslo, explains: “These weapon systems, as we have seen, have very long ranges, up to 2,000 km, which has allowed Ukraine to hit targets very, very far from the front line. There are two major problems with these types of weapon systems: they are rather slow, which means that they are quite vulnerable, once detected – it is quite easy to shoot them down. Also, they have a very limited payload capacity, which means that their destructive power, compared to that of a Storm Shadow or SCALP-EG cruise missile, is very, very limited. It is simply not as lethal as the weapon systems that Western states could provide and have provided to Ukraine, but which, of course, only allow their use inside Ukraine.”
This article is originally published on fr.euronews.com
