Ukraine hit a Russian weapons arsenal with US-made ATACMS missiles that it fired across the border for the first time, according to two US officials, in a major escalation on the 1,000th day of the war.
Russia’s Defense Ministry stated that Ukraine fired six ballistic missiles at a facility in Bryansk at 3:25 a.m. local time (7:25 p.m. ET) on Tuesday, November 19th and that ATACMS missiles had been used in the attack.
The attack comes just two days after the Biden administration gave Kyiv the green light to use longer-range American weapons against targets inside Russia.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said Ukraine fired six ballistic missiles at a facility in Bryansk at 3:25 a.m. local time (7:25 p.m. ET) Tuesday and that ATACMS missiles had been used in the attack.
The attack marks the first time Ukraine has used longer-range American weapons to strike targets deep inside Russia and shows that Kyiv has wasted little time in making use of its newly granted powers.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky declined to confirm or deny the attack during a Tuesday news conference but said: “Ukraine has long-range capabilities. Ukraine has long-range drones of its own production. We now have a long ‘Neptune’ (Ukrainian cruise missiles) and not just one. And now we have ATACMS. And we will use all of this.”
Russian air defenses said they shot down five of the missiles and another was damaged. Fragments from the damaged missile fell on the territory of a military facility, causing a fire that has since been extinguished. There were no casualties or damage.
On the same day of the attack, Russian President Vladimir Putin updated Russia’s nuclear doctrine where Moscow will consider aggression from any non-nuclear state – but with the participation of a nuclear country – a joint attack on Russia.
So, after Kyiv’s first use of long-range American missiles inside Russia, Putin ordered to fire missiles at Ukraine.
Russia launched a barrage of missiles at Ukraine Thursday in its first major retaliation for Ukraine’s attack earlier in the week on a military facility in the Russian region of Bryansk. That strike saw the Ukrainians use American-made and supplied long-range missiles known as ATACMS, which President Biden had permitted the Ukrainian forces to fire deeper into Russian territory only two days earlier.
Moscow had warned the U.S. and its NATO allies for months against permitting Ukraine to fire Western missiles into Russia, and Mr. Biden’s weekend decision to permit such strikes drew stark new warnings from lawmakers and Russian media close to President Vladimir Putin that the U.S. was escalating the nearly three-year conflict at the risk of sparking a new world war.
The U.S. and its allies have argued that it’s Putin escalating the war he started by ordering the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, including by deploying more than 10,000 North Korean soldiers to bolster his own forces in recent weeks. But there was little doubt that Moscow would respond to the Ukrainians’ first use of the American ATACMS to strike inside Russia somehow, and air raid sirens blared across the country Wednesday as the U.S. closed its embassy in Kyiv and warned of a possible imminent “significant air attack.”
The attack didn’t come on Wednesday, but rather overnight, with Russian missiles targeting several cities but, hitting central-eastern Dnipro the hardest. The Ukrainian Air Force claimed that Russia’s assault on the city included its first use during the war of an intercontinental ballistic missile, though a Western official told CBS News on Thursday, November 21st, that an ICBM was not used in the strike.
Two U.S. officials also told CBS News that Russia had fired a ballistic missile, not an ICBM on Thursday, with one saying it appeared to have been an intermediate-range ballistic missile launched from just east of Volgograd, Russia, to target Dnipro. If accurate, that would be a flight path of about 500 miles.
With information from CBS News
San Miguel Times
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