With Western weapons, turning the tables
KHERSON REGION, Ukraine — On the screen of a thermal imaging camera, the Russian armored personnel carrier disappeared in a silent puff of smoke.
“What a beautiful explosion,” said First Lieutenant Serhiy, a Ukrainian drone pilot who watched as his weapon buzzed into a Russian-controlled village and picked off the armored vehicle, a blast that was audible seconds later at his position about 4 miles away.
“We used to cheer, we used to shout, ‘Hurray!’ but we’re used to it now,” he said.
The war in Ukraine has been fought primarily through the air, with artillery, rockets, missiles, and drones. And for months, Russia had the upper hand, able to lob munitions at Ukrainian cities, towns, and military targets from positions well beyond the reach of Ukrainian weapons.
But in recent months, the tide has turned along the front lines in southern Ukraine. With powerful Western weapons and deadly homemade drones, Ukraine now has artillery superiority in the area, commanders and military analysts say.
Ukraine now has an edge in range and in precision-guided rockets and artillery shells, a class of weapons largely lacking in Russia’s arsenal. Ukrainian soldiers are taking out armored vehicles worth millions of dollars with cheap homemade drones, as well as with more advanced drones and other weapons provided by the United States and allies.
The Russian military remains a formidable force, with cruise missiles, a sizable army, and millions of rounds of artillery shells, albeit imprecise ones. It has just completed a mobilization effort that will add 300,000 troops to the battlefield, Russian commanders say, although many of those will be illtrained and ill-equipped. And President Vladimir Putin has made clear his determination to win the war at almost any cost.
Still, there is no mistaking the shifting fortunes on the southern front.
Ukraine’s growing advantage in artillery, a stark contrast to fighting throughout the country over the summer when Russia pummeled Ukrainian positions with mortar and artillery fire, has allowed slow if costly progress in the south toward the strategic port city of Kherson, the only provincial capital that Russia managed to occupy after invading in February.
The new capabilities were on display in the predawn hours Saturday when Ukrainian drones hit a Russian vessel docked in the Black Sea Fleet’s home port of Sevastopol, deep in the occupied territory of Crimea, once thought an impregnable bastion.
The contrast with the battlefield over the summer could not be starker.
In the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, Russia fired roughly 10 artillery rounds for each answering shell from Ukrainian batteries. In Kherson now, Ukrainian commanders say the sides are firing about equal numbers of shells, but Ukraine’s strikes are not only longer range but more precise because of the satellite-guided rockets and artillery rounds provided by the West.
“We can reach them and they cannot reach us,” said Major Oleksandr, the commander of an artillery battery on the Kherson front, who like others interviewed for this article gave only his first name for security reasons. “They don’t have these weapons.”
The US-provided M777 howitzers firing precision-guided shells and striking up to 20 miles behind Russian lines have forced the Russians to stage heavy equipment farther from the front. Ukrainian drones spot infantry but fewer tanks or armored vehicles near the front line, said First Lieutenant Oleh, the commander of a unit flying reconnaissance drones. “We hear a lot of rumors they are abandoning the first lines of defense.”
This firepower has tipped the balance in the south, raising expectations that a long-anticipated assault on Kherson is drawing near — although a swirl of apparent misdirection from military leaders on both sides has clouded the picture.
The question remains just how long the Russian forces can, or will, hold out in Kherson.
“Russia is unable to maintain logistics supplies” to the west bank of the Dnieper River, said Konrad Muzyka, a military analyst and the director of Rochan Consulting, based in Gdansk, Poland.
He added that the Ukrainian military’s claim to have achieved the upper hand in artillery and front-line drone strikes in the south was “highly plausible.”
After a recent Ukrainian assault using American M777 howitzers and High Mobility Artillery Rockets, Slovak Zuzana self-propelled artillery, and Polish Krab self-propelled artillery, Muzyka said, citing Ukrainian military sources, heavily battered Russian artillery positions on one section of the Kherson front went silent for more than 48 hours.
A recent drone attack led by Serhiy provided another example of the Russian forces’ vulnerabilities.
Equipped with night vision goggles — an essential item of modern warfare that the Russian forces generally lack — the soldiers drove to the front line in a sport-utility vehicle with the headlights off, passing the jagged ruins of houses in a destroyed village silhouetted by a thin sliver of the moon.
Rattling under the driver’s seat were eight small bombs, each packed with 1.5 pounds of high explosives, enough to obliterate an armored vehicle. In the rear storage area sat a high-end, commercially available drone.
From a rooftop position, two former computer programmers turned tank hunters directed the drone strikes that took out two Russian armored vehicles in the space of about three hours, destroying more than $1 million of Russian weaponry with a weapon that cost about $20,000.
Farther from the front line, out of drone range, US-provided, satellite-guided artillery shells have forced the Russian military to carefully camouflage or pull back heavy equipment, said Oleh, the commander of a drone surveillance unit.
“Russia’s advantage was only one thing: quantity,” Oleh said in an interview at his base, a house along a muddy lane in a village.
While the messaging and movement of forces around Kherson on both sides have been hard to decipher, by design, there is no mistaking which side has the momentum.