- Ukrainian forces took out more than 100 Russian soldiers with an ATACMS missile, per OSINT analysts.
- Four ATACMS were used to target the group, one analyst said.
- The soldiers would have been out of reach of Ukraine’s shorter-range ATACMS missiles.
A Ukrainian ATACMS long-range missile strike killed more than 100 Russian soldiers in an occupied region 50 miles from the front line, according to OSINT and military analysts.
Ukrainian forces targeted a Russian military training area some 50 miles behind the front line in the occupied Luhansk Oblast in eastern Ukraine, per an assessment by The Institute for the Study of War.
According to two aerial geolocated videos posted on Wednesday by X user Osinttechnical, an account affiliated with the Centre for Naval Analyses, Ukraine appeared to strike the training area with three US-supplied M39 ATACMS tactical ballistic missiles.
As you note, Afghanistan beat the Soviet Union, there is no reason to believe Ukraine cannot beat Russia. It is also unlikely to take 20 years given how deeply Russia is expending their Soviet inheritance. We are actively watching Russia drain this one-time resource as their storage yards deplete every month. We have watched the Black Sea Fleet sink and the remnants relegated to the furthest coasts of Russia while Ukrainian grain shipments have recovered. This war is winnable, and Ukraine intends to do just that.
Afghan Taliban fighters had big mountain ranges to hide in and retaliate from. And the USSR had no real objective in Afghanistan. It wasn’t a frontline of conflict in the Cold War, just an expensive distraction.
Ukrainians have nowhere to hide. They’re defending cities not hiding in rural highlands. And they’re not fighting the USSR for religious reasons, they’re fighting a turf war for economic reasons.
They’re in the same position as Germany at the end of WW2, defending thousands of miles of flat muddy countryside against layers of mobile artillery.
Russia has the world’s second largest arms industry. They aren’t working off a one time resource, any more than America was in the South Pacific in the wake of Pearl Harbor.