South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Russians lean on outdated missiles
Eastern Ukrainian city of Lysychansk may fall by Monday
KYIV, Ukraine — An attack on a mall Monday, killing 19 civilians. A missile strike on a resort town Friday, claiming the lives of at least 21 residents. Cluster bombs Saturday hit a residential block in an industrial hub, leaving four dead.
The pace of Russia’s strikes on civilian targets, often with outdated and imprecise missiles, is picking up, Ukrainian and Western officials as well as Russian analysts say, as its forces run low on more sophisticated weapons.
Over 200 missiles were fired on Ukrainian government-controlled territory in the second half of June, more than double the number in the first half of the month, Ukrainian Brig. Gen. Oleksii Hromov said Thursday.
Some of the deadliest strikes of the war have occurred in the past week. In the mall attack in the central city of Kremenchuk, Russia fired two Kh-class missiles. The same type of missile ripped into an apartment building in the Black Sea resort of Serhiivka.
Soviet Kh-class missiles, designed to target ships, entered the country’s arsenal in the 1960s, prompting analysts to speculate about Russia’s decreasing ability to attack with modern weapons as its forces prepare for the next stage of the conflict.
The use of such weapons “to terrorize the Ukrainian cities from the air serves as yet more evidence of Russia’s falling stocks of long-range precision munitions,” said Pavel Luzin, a Russian military analyst.
That assessment was
echoed by the United Kingdom’s defense attaché, Mick Smeath, who on Saturday said the use of old anti-ship rockets pointed to Russia’s dwindling modern weapons.
On Saturday, Russian forces pushed into Lysychansk, the last city in the eastern Luhansk province that remained outside Russian control, according to Moscow’s state news agency, social media posts by pro-Russian forces and a Ukrainian soldier in the city. Both sides said fighting is ongoing in parts of the city.
Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said late Saturday that Russian forces had managed to cross the river from the north, creating a “threatening” situation. Arestovych
said they had not reached the center of the city, but control over Lysychansk would be decided by Monday.
Military analysts warn Russia now faces the difficult task of maintaining its slowing offensive into the Donetsk province to achieve its aim of capturing Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region as its losses mount.
The growing use of Kh-class missiles has coincided with rising estimates of Russian military casualties by Western intelligence agencies. The British defense chief, Ben Wallace, said this past week that 25,000 Russian soldiers had been killed in the war. That number, the highest estimate yet provided by a senior Western official, could not be independently confirmed.
The most recent estimate by the Pentagon put Russian losses at 15,000.
“Moscow doesn’t want to end the war, but it needs to catch its breath to heal wounds and partly replenish its weapons stock,” Luzin said.
Zelenskyy said Friday night that the Russian forces had lobbed more than 3,000 missiles at Ukraine in four months of the war.
More broadly, Ukrainian officials are warning that the rise in civilian attacks could signal a new phase of the war as Russia tries to make up for its shrinking military capacity with attempts to degrade Ukrainian morale.
“The Russians have moved to the concept of war where they want to create large-scale panic in
Ukraine,” Mykhailo Podolyak, another adviser to Zelenskyy, said Saturday.
Since the start of the war, Russia has maintained an increasingly untenable position that it fires only at military targets and any civilian facilities that have been hit had been co-opted by Ukraine. These claims have found resonance among the Russian people, many of whom are influenced by state-controlled television networks and conservative pro-war online commentators.
In recent days, the Kremlin’s propaganda machine has stepped up efforts to escape blame — particularly among the Russian public, many of whom have deep cultural and family ties to Ukraine — by portraying the bombardment of civilian targets as false-flag operations by the Ukrainian government.
On Friday, the Russian military claimed without evidence that the attack on Odesa, until recently a majority Russian-speaking city, was staged by paid actors.
Ukraine withdrew some of its soldiers from Lysychansk on Saturday to escape a possible encirclement by Russian forces that broke through defenses to the south of the city, according to the Ukrainian soldier, Sergiy, who recently withdrew from the city. He asked that his last name be withheld for security reasons.