U.S. administration officials said Russian forces had directed 90 percent of aircraft carrying out glide bomb strikes away from Russian airspace from airfields within range of Storm Shadow and ATACMS missiles.
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The American think tank Institute for the Study of War claims that 16 air bases are located 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 some vulnerabilities, experts say.
Fabian Rene Hoffmann, a doctoral student at the University of Oslo, explains: “These weapons 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 weapons 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 weapons systems that Western states could provide and have provided to Ukraine, but which, of course, only allow their use inside Ukraine.”
Any assessment that rejects the authorization given to Ukraine to strike legitimate military targets in Russia based exclusively on air force redeployments is incomplete, because it does not take into account the hundreds of other objects supporting Russia’s war against Ukraine and would therefore be incorrect.
