According to the British Ministry of Defense, the missile shower is intended, among other things, to thwart supplies to Ukrainian troops at the front. The Russians would also try to prevent heavy Western weapons from reaching the battlefield.
After Kyiv and Kremenchuk, it was the turn of the southern city of Mykolaiv on Wednesday to be shelled. Here too civilian targets were hit. According to the mayor, eight rockets were fired at targets in the city, including an apartment building. The attacks in Mykolaiv came two days after 18 people were killed in an attack on a shopping center in Kremenchuk.
Ukraine is convinced that Moscow wants to sow fear among the population with all these rocket attacks. But the Russians may have wanted to destroy an “infrastructural” target nearby, British intelligence said on Wednesday of the attack on the mall, but it went terribly wrong because an inaccurate missile was used.
Fired from a safe distance
The rocket fires once again underline how difficult the Russian army has to strike from great distances with great accuracy. With the air force still not in control of Ukrainian airspace after four months of fighting, Moscow is hesitant to deploy fighter jets on a large scale over the battlefield.
Until now, Russia has tried to solve this problem with modern cruise missiles, safely fired from warships in the Black Sea. But because some 2,500 rockets have now been fired, there is a risk of a shortage of high-tech weapons. Reason why the Russians now have to switch more and more to older, less accurate missiles from the Soviet era. These missiles are also fired from a safe distance, over Russia, by strategic Tupolev bombers, among others.
Among the estimated 130 rockets fired since the weekend, according to Ukrainian army chief Valeri Zaluzhny, were many Kh-22 rockets, according to Kyiv and London. This is spicy because this missile, which was developed in the 1960s, is not intended to destroy military targets on land at all. With the Kh-22, the Soviet army wanted, among other things, to harass the American fleet, especially the aircraft carriers.
Very inaccurate
The nearly 40-foot-long anti-ship missile has a range of about 600 kilometers and flies toward a target at five times the speed of sound. After a video first surfaced in May of a Tupolev firing two of these old missiles, London confirmed the deployment of the Kh-22 early this month. Dozens are said to have been used since April. On top of this are now the missiles that have been used in recent days.
“These 5,500-pound missiles were primarily intended to destroy aircraft carriers with a nuclear warhead,” the Ministry of Defense said two weeks ago. “When deployed for ground attacks, with a conventional payload, they are highly inaccurate and can therefore cause significant collateral damage and civilian casualties.”
Insist
According to London, the Kh-22 attacks will continue, especially as the number of high-tech weapons decreases. “Russian military planners are most likely willing to accept a lot of collateral damage if they feel an attack is militarily necessary,” the ministry said.
Moscow’s new missile strategy comes as Ukraine urges the US to provide air defense systems so it can bring down Russia’s missiles. With the weapons now available to Kyiv, the Ukrainian military cannot destroy the high-speed Kh-22 and modern Russian cruise missiles.
After weeks of urging by the Ukrainians, the White House has relented. President Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan said on Monday that Kyiv will soon receive “advanced air defense systems.” It is not clear which weapons are involved.