Ukrainian operational planners have hit a Russian tactical headquarters with at least two High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) precision-guided missiles – one loaded with cluster munitions – and then deployed swarms of first-person view (FPV) kamikaze drones that hunted down survivors, Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence (HUR) said on Monday.
A headquarters of a Russian combat unit headquarters operating in the southern Zaporizhzhia region was reportedly destroyed in the attacks. A video showed how a first missile hit a group of Russian vehicles parked next to a wheat field almost in the middle with a single warhead.
In a follow-up attack with a cluster munition warhead, a soccer field-sized piece of farmland around the headquarters is shown being saturated with anti-personnel explosives.
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The scale of the cluster munitions strike was consistent with an Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) missile, the most powerful long-range weapon operated by Ukraine. HUR’s statement said that a HIMARS – the US-made artillery system designed to fire ATACMS missiles – fired the missiles shown in the attack video, although it did not specify exactly what munitions were used.
Images taken from the ground showed at least five destroyed Russian vehicles and three dead Russian soldiers. The terrain and vehicle positions on the ground images matched the drone video, but it was not possible to pinpoint the location of the attack, Kyiv Post’s researchers found.
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HUR’s statement said operators assigned to the Taifun group from Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU), artillery unit and strike drone pilots assigned to Ukraine’s southern command group Tavria participated in the operation. Ukrainian FPV drones hunted down both survivors and Russian medical evacuation teams arriving on the scene, the statement said.
The HUR video identified the observation platform recording the strike as a Shark drone, a high-tech aircraft usually operated by SBU or HUR special operators.
According to HUR, the attack was directed against a group of high-ranking officers assigned to the Russian armed forces stationed in southern Ukraine. In the Ukrainian statements, the individual Russian officers who were killed in the attack were rarely mentioned by name. Allegedly, a battalion commander and a senior staff officer of the Russian 135th Motorized Rifle Brigade died, as well as the commander of the Russian military base of the 4th Brigade.
Kyiv Post could not independently confirm the HUR claims. Russian army and defense ministry statements on Monday did not mention the strike.
Ukraine’s Centre for Strategic Communications on Sunday confirmed that a Dec. 25 strike using HIMARS precision-guided weapons controlled by long-range drone observers hit a command post of the Russian 810th Marine Brigade in Lgov, Kursk Oblast.
The attack using tactics similar to Monday’s Zaporizhzhia strike likely killed the brigade’s deputy commander and 17 other soldiers. Russian state-controlled media claimed the Lgov strike was a terrorist attack that hit a Russian apartment block and killed only civilians. The Kremlin claims were contradicted by Russian social media in which civilian relatives of 810th Brigade soldiers confirmed their men were serving in the 810th Brigade and were hit in the Lgov attack.
Advertising image showing the observation element and gimbel aboard a Ukraine-manufactured Shark drone. Per video published by Ukraine’s military intelligence agency HUR on Monday, Shark drone operators called in a pair of devastating HIMARS strikes on a Russian army headquarters unit in the southern Zaporizhzhia region.
Kyiv Post collage. Left images are screen grabs from a HUR video published on Monday of two HIMARS-launched strikes geolocated to Ukraine’s southern Zaporizhzhia region. The center-left image shows the image of a unitary explosive warhead, and the lower-left image shows the impact of a cluster munition warhead. Right image is a nationworldnews.com image of a HIMARS system firing a precision-guided rocket.
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