- 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.
Imagine you’re in Russia. You see every person who was ever a real threat to the government die or disappear. You can’t flee the country. A coup is highly unlikely; Prigozhin just tried it and the plane he was on mysteriously blew up. You don’t have a lot of options. Makes sense to take your chances against Ukraine than try to overthrow the Russian military/government.
What really needs to happen is for war law to be changed to allow heads of state and government buildings to be targeted. Then they’d be a lot more careful about going to war.
Not in a strategic sense, no, because Kremlin guards are still less well armed than Ukraine. The trouble, of course, is that people are too scared to make that kind of cool-headed analysis but as soon as there’s a crack in the regime because, say, Omon can’t respond to lesser incidents because they’re lying in a ditch in Ukraine the dam would break. Which OTOH is rather unlikely to happen because regime security is Putin’s #1 concern, he’d let go of Ukraine before risking it, so he won’t kill off their response capability like that. He may be mad but he’s not crazy.
Bad idea. If Putin loses, the Siloviki have a good justification for a coup. If Putin gets assassinated, they’d be forced to declare him a martyr and continue the fight.
And Ukraine thinks the same or the SBU would already have gotten to him. They’re also not touching the likes of Shoigu, they only target competent people: The more of a clown show the Russian regime is the easier the war becomes.