THOMAS MUTCH
KHERSON CITY, UKRAINE—It seemed like every inch of the town square was draped in blue and yellow flags. An old woman wept as she spoke to a family member on the phone for the first time in weeks. A group of young people sang the Ukrainian national anthem at the top of their lungs on a raised plinth. To cap it all off, the man of the moment, President Volodymr Zelensky, confidently strode through the middle of the city, which about six weeks ago, Russia had presumed to annex. He made a point to thank the United States for its delivery of HIMARS, which he said made a “huge difference” in the Ukrainian Army’s efforts to liberate its territory, while speaking at a recent press conference attended by Popular Mechanics.
Before the recent counter offensives in Kharkiv and Kherson began, nighttime explosions could be heard anywhere in Russian-occupied Ukraine. Ammunition depots, command posts, bridges, and railways are just a few of the dozens of targets that the Ukrainian army had been pulverizing for weeks with Western-supplied weapons ahead of its bid to liberate territory in southern and eastern Ukraine.
In May and June, Ukraine’s future on the battlefield seemed bleak. “Western-supplied weapons are a real game changer, they are allowing us to get back in the fight,” one senior Ukrainian defense official told Popular Mechanics at the time. They admitted that without these weapons, the Ukrainian army had little chance of seizing back its lands.
Now, the Ukrainians have taken back territory at an unprecedented rate. In the east, they have liberated the key cities of Izyum, Kupyansk, and Lyman, taking back more territory in a matter of weeks than the Russians had captured since their retreat from Kyiv in March. Just last week, Ukraine achieved its biggest accomplishment yet—the liberation of all of southern Ukraine west of the Dnipro River.
Just months ago, a Ukrainian operation like this would have been unthinkable. When I visited the frontlines in Donbas in late May, the Ukrainian army was suffering its worst casualties of the war as Russia made steady territorial gains. At a barracks on the frontline trenches in Izyum, northern Ukraine, we watched a seemingly endless stream of shells and explosions smash into the fields around us.
The soldiers told me they lacked armored vehicles, ammunition, and the heavy artillery needed to beat the Russians back—the mood was glum, and defeat seemed inevitable. The Russians’ advantage in artillery was simply too much for Ukrainian troops to bear. At the climax of the battle for the Luhansk region, Russia was using up to 20,000 shells per day, and killing up to 100 Ukrainian troops per day. When the battle for Severodonetsk, the region’s biggest Ukrainian-held city, was raging, Ukraine effectively ran out of its old Soviet stockpiles of ammunition, which was a major factor in its decision to withdraw from the region.
Since then, an unprecedented supply of weapons from the United States and other NATO countries has poured over the borders into Ukraine. The French and Germans have sent mobile Caesar and PZH2000 Howitzers, and the British have provided Starstreak anti-missile launchers.
Because the Ukrainian military was mainly trained on Soviet-era systems, former Warsaw Pact countries such as Poland and Slovakia have transferred much of their stock of T72 tanks to Ukraine, and are producing the antiquated 152-millimeter artillery ammunition that Ukraine’s old guns rely on.
All this has allowed Ukraine to not just stem the bleeding, but seize momentum on the battlefield, and turn the war decisively in its favor. The Russian army hasn’t captured any significant settlement since June. It has been stuck bombarding the small Donbas cities of Siversk, Bakhmut, and Soledar, but hasn’t managed to dislodge the Ukrainian army from them.
Advanced U.S. weapons systems, particularly High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), are causing the greatest impact on the battlefield—and may soon allow Ukraine to take the initiative. HIMARS have a range of more than 50 miles, easily outshooting any Russian artillery piece. As soon as they were delivered to the front line, the Ukrainian military was able to hit military targets at a much longer range than before. Within days of these weapons reaching the frontline, Ukrainians were striking Russian ammunition storage depots throughout the Donbas and the south. HIMARS were also crucial in destroying Russian artillery positions in Kharkiv, which in turn allowed the Ukrainian army to successfully attack in this region.
Because these weapons are “scoot and shoot,” meaning they can move from their positions very quickly after firing to avoid a Russian counter battery barrage, it’s very hard to take them out with counter artillery fire. “No military is properly prepared to deal with the deep strike and precision fire” that these weapons provide, according to Michael Kofman, an expert on Russia at the Arlington, Virginia-based Center for Naval Analyses. That means that the Russians “must move major offload points far behind the frontline and distribute storage. It will substantially reduce the effect of the ammunition supply to artillery.”
HIMARS truck launching a missileU.S. Army
HIMARS are having three major impacts, according to Jack Watling, a senior research fellow for land warfare at the Royal United Services Institute in London. “The first is the destruction of Russian artillery ammunition, which reduces the body of fire generated by Russian batteries. ... The second is the destruction of Russian command posts, which kills the skilled operators who do Russian fire control. ... The third is to target logistics and troop movements, reducing the number of troops the Russians can support in a given position.” This bodes well for upcoming Ukrainian operations, Watling says. “[Russia] will struggle to maintain a sufficient force density to hold somewhere like Kherson.”
Ukrainians used HIMARS to target the bridges on the Dnipro River that the Russians had been using to supply their troops in Kherson city, trapping thousands of occupying troops in the city and threatening to completely cut their ground lines of supply and communication. With a Ukrainian offensive looming, the new Russian theater commander, General Sergey Surovikin, looked at the map and decided it wasn’t worth the fight to hold the city. Russian troops staged what was for their standards, a competent withdrawal, and the Ukrainian army entered the city unopposed.
Next to the village of Novopetrovsk, around 30 kilometers away from Kherson city, you can see the damage from Ukrainian weapons systems. There are a series of Russian trenches that served as the frontline for six months; It’s now littered with abandoned weapons and ammunition. In the middle lies the remains of a tank that has been almost entirely vaporized—only the tracks remain intact, the entire shell having been turned into a heap of twisted metal after a direct hit from Ukrainian artillery.
This new military advantage is here to stay, according to Kofman. “HIMARS is not something that will become ineffective. There is no way for Russia to negate this capability, and adaptation will require making big tradeoffs on combat efficiency.” Worsening economic conditions or the vagaries of democratic politics could all upend these countries’ calculations around support for Ukraine in the long term. However, Ukraine’s battlefield successes have demonstrated that these weapons are having a meaningful effect on the course of the war, and this has reassured Western backers.
Watling takes a more cautious tone, noting that there are still large problems with logistics and supply of ammunition. “... There is a limited supply of ammo, and the rockets are scarce, so while they have a very high effect, the Ukrainians will only be able to draw on that capability for a limited amount of time, after which they will have to be very cautious on what they choose to prioritize with the munitions that they have.”
U.S. fears of “provoking” Moscow or crossing Russian “red lines” by delivering heavy weapons to Ukraine appear to have completely faded away. For their part, the Ukrainians are demanding more and better weapons to end the war and reclaim the rest of their territory as soon as possible.
But, if the Ukrainians are serious about this, they have a series of very difficult fights ahead of them. The cities of Donetsk and Luhansk, as well as the Crimean Peninsula, have been controlled by Russia for eight years, giving its military ample time to prepare extensive defenses and indoctrinate the local population. It remains to be seen whether Western support—HIMARS included—will be enough.
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