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EASTERN UKRAINE – The main weapon in Ukraine’s arsenal was driven along an unmarked dirt road, along a field of sunflowers, before its military guards parked it among trees. the branches that protect her from Russian drones that are certainly looking for her.
The M142 high-mobility artillery rocket system, commonly known as HIMARS, is one of four that Ukrainians received last month from the United States as part of a $ 700 million military aid package. The soldiers attached to it already adorned the interior with a painting of a poorly dressed woman, an air freshener and a rosary. The exterior has three small patterned black skulls, one for each hit successfully hit.
“We actually have six,” said the head of this system, whose ring signal is Kuzya. “We haven’t had a chance to add the other three yet.”
After public frustration over Western delays in the promised heavy weapons transfer, specifically multi-launch rocket systems such as HIMARS, the Ukrainians have quickly set to work their new hardware more than four months after Russia launched the its large-scale invasion. Kuzya and his comrades said their targets so far have focused on Russian command posts – warehouses where enemy officers and weapons were stationed.
Ukrainian officials say the new stretch of Western material is already making a difference on the battlefield, a testament to the importance of continued security assistance and the painful cost of slow deliveries as the Russian army expands slowly its control in the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine. According to reports, artillery attacks from French self-propelled shells parked in the port city of Odessa forced the Russians to withdraw from the strategically important snake island in the Black Sea on Thursday.
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HIMARS is the most advanced system provided by the United States and has the longest range of Ukrainian ground weapons, nearly 50 miles, which allows its forces to accurately attack Russian military targets without endangering their own. civilians in the occupied territories. Ukraine had been asking for weapons for about two months before the transfer was approved, after Ukraine assured the Biden administration that it would not use them to launch cross-border attacks on Russia.
The Biden administration promised to send four more HIMARS to Ukraine as part of an additional $ 450 million in aid announced last week. All four were proposed in Europe, and training in these systems has already begun with Ukrainian troops using them, according to a Pentagon spokesman.
“What we used before was much more troubling,” said the shooter of the four-person team, whose function is to enter the coordinates of the target. Its ring signal is Moroz, which translates as “frost.”
HIMARS also provides more peace of mind, the soldiers said. With their old equipment, they avoided rocket trajectories passing through any population settlement, limiting them to firing only through fields and forests, to avoid potentially harming civilians, Moroz said.
“I have no doubt about what we will hit,” Moroz said. “I know the rocket will hit its target because it is being navigated by satellite.”
The system that this unit used before was the Soviet-era Hurricane, a self-propelled multiple rocket launcher that had a maximum range of about 20 miles. He also had a margin of error of about half a mile and headed in coordination with a drone or reconnaissance team. The HIMARS is guided by satellite and deviates from the coordinates of the target by a maximum of one meter, the soldiers said.
They asked to be identified only by their call signals as a security measure. With systems considered a priority target for Russians, the families of team members don’t even know they work with them. They have to keep HIMARS in constant motion because staying in a place for too long runs the risk of discovering its location.
The launcher contains six rockets and is connected to a dark green truck rack. Operations take place mostly at night: soldiers are kept at a distance and count before shouting “fire!” There is a flash of bright light as each rocket takes off. Then, they are ready to move in two minutes, and speed is essential to keep the HIMARS safe so the Russians can quickly locate the source of the shooting and shoot. Mobility is impressive: for a huge vehicle, it can move up to 60 miles per hour, they said.
“We were also surprised that a high-precision weapon could fire so quietly,” Kuzya said.
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The unit eagerly awaited the arrival of the HIMARS for a month. Then, finally, they had first-hand experience in a secret place outside Ukraine with American instructors for about two weeks. Instead of letting the Americans just demonstrate, the Ukrainian troops asked them to explain what they had to do, for the students to try to adjust from there.
“They were like,‘ Oh [expletive]he said with a smile, in a bulletproof vest stamped with a skull patch and “Welcome to Hell.”
The computer system is entirely in English, so at the time of training, the interpreters explained what each button meant, all documented in a notebook that soldiers regularly consult. But Google Translate is still needed sometimes.
Kuzya said it would be good to have 50 HIMARS so that Ukraine could deploy four in each direction from an extensive front that spans almost its entire eastern border with Russia. “Sputnik,” the unit’s commander, said it would have been better to have had the equipment before, before Moscow forces took control of most of the country’s Luhansk region.
“I think it took too long to get them here,” he said. “If they had been here much earlier, I think we would have already ended this war.”
Anastasia Vlasova contributed to this report.