11 months ago
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On Wednesday, kos noted that there was evidence that Ukraine had made additional use of the ATACMS long-range missiles recently delivered by the United States. Russia made note of it too, because Telegram and state media sources were both overrun with claims that ATACMS launches had been shot down.
The problem was that the portion of the missile that the Russians kept showing was essentially the booster, not the payload. Rather than showing signs of being shredded by any air defense system, both of those ATACMS looked as if they had done their job, delivered their explosives, and simply dropped to the Earth, expended. It also seemed more than coincidental that there had been some significant explosions in the same area where the ATACMS boosters had been found.
Now it seems that Russian Telegram is ‘fessing up. The two ATACMS rockets were destroyed … but not as the result of any air defense. Instead, “It is exactly like this. Two ATACMS missiles were destroyed as a result of a direct hit on the position of the Russian Armed Forces air defense group in Luhansk region and at the cost of 3 S-400 systems deployed there."
