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Russia’s infantry is stuck in front of Kharkiv, its glide bombs continue to fall. The USA is therefore changing its mind and is giving priority to Ukraine with Patriot deliveries.
Kharkiv – “Driven back by the Russians, the Ukrainians now have to experience that their positions are becoming death traps,” writes Gernot Kramper. star In March, the author reported on the increased use of Russian glide bombs. Apparently, the situation is escalating further: A three-ton glide bomb is said to have landed in the village of Lyptsi near Kharkiv and landed next to a clinic, according to the Defense Express reported. The magazine refers to a video by the Russian military blogger “Fighterbomber” on X (formerly Twitter), which cannot be independently verified.
Vladimir Putin may be escalating the war against the civilian population because he is running out of resources to bring Ukraine to its knees militarily. As can be seen in the video, however, the building appears to have been a ruin or abandoned even before that.
“The Russian aim was to advance to Kharkiv at least within artillery range – not to take the city itself, which they would not be able to do logistically, but to advance far enough to be able to credibly threaten the city or credibly bombard it,” says Marcus Keupp in ZDF“However, the advance came to a halt quite quickly and quite strongly. They advanced about three or four kilometers from the Ukrainian border and were then stopped,” explains Keupp. The military economist of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich speaks in ZDF of the conflicts in the triangle of the settlement areas of Kharkiv, Lyptsi and Vovchansk.
The new dimension of glide bombs: Putin’s three-ton explosive device
The use of glide bombs is Russia’s primary means of paving the way for its infantry in the Ukraine war as cost-effectively as ruthlessly – a bomb that no longer just falls steeply downwards thanks to stabilizers, but follows a trajectory over several kilometers so that its carrier system can remain out of the range of air defenses. The FAB-3000 M-54 represents the new dimension of Russian glide bombs, as the Defense Express makes it clear: It is 3.3 meters long, has a diameter of one meter including the stabilizer and has a total weight of 3,067 kilograms – of which 1,200 kilograms are explosives. “Therefore, a bomb that misses by even a few dozen meters is less serious than with the FAB-250 or FAB-500,” writes Defense Express.
“We will re-prioritize the delivery of these exports so that the missiles that come off the assembly line will now be delivered to Ukraine.”
The region around Kharkiv is currently the primary focus of the Russian invasion army and its bombing terror. “Their goal is to turn the city into a ghost town, so that no one stays there, that there is nothing left to defend, that there is no point in defending the city. They want to scare people, but they will not succeed,” says Oleksandr Lutsenko, as the news magazine Euronews reported. Lutsenko is the manager of a shopping center that has since been destroyed. Kharkiv and its surroundings have been under heavy shelling throughout June.
Russia’s terror against civilians: “Catastrophic conditions” around Kharkiv
Meanwhile, the intensity of the latest Russian attacks is increasing. In May, more civilians were killed than in any previous month since June last year, Joyce Msuya said in early June in the United Nations Security Council (UN)The Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Deputy Emergency Relief Coordinator reported at least 174 civilians dead and 690 injured. “More than half of these casualties are due to the fighting in Kharkiv,” she reported, according to the U.N. and noted that “in recent weeks, shopping malls, residential buildings, educational institutions, shops, office buildings, parks and public transport have been hit. According to estimates by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) At least 18,000 people were newly displaced in the Kharkiv region.”
According to a U.N.In a press release, the Ukrainian government noted that civilians remaining in the frontline areas in Kharkiv are facing “catastrophic conditions” – they have no access to food, medical care, electricity and gas – and stressed that older people are disproportionately affected because they are often unable or unwilling to leave their homes. For them, it is “deeply worrying that systematic attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure – a feature of this war since February 2022 – continue.”
The USA is rethinking: Ukraine will be given priority in supplying Patriot in the future
The three-ton free-fall bombs are said to be the heaviest explosive devices of the Russian Air Force, as Defense Express reported in March – at that time Russia was still working on making these bombs “smart”, i.e. converting them into a guided missile. This was done according to Defense Express by means of the “UMP” (Russian: Universalnyi Modul Planirovania I Korrekcii; English: unified sliding and correction module).
According to Defense Express for the 500 and 1,500 kilogram variants already exists, but had to be converted. The magazine sees a difficulty in the carrier aircraft; only the strategic bomber Tu-22M3 seems to be able to move this mass. Defense Express However, he doubts that Russia wants to expose these aircraft to the danger of Russian air defense. The aircraft had already been used over Mariupol, but the Ukrainian air defense had less firepower at the time.
Russia’s high command will in future be confronted with the fact that the United States “against the background of the increasing threat from the use of Russian glide bombs in Ukraine, have changed their policy and given priority to the delivery of Patriot anti-missiles to Ukraine, as the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) with reference to the transmitter CBS writes. “We will re-prioritize the delivery of these exports so that the missiles that are coming off the production line will now be delivered to Ukraine,” said John Kirby. “This will ensure that we can provide Ukraine with the missiles it needs to maintain its stockpile at a critical moment in the war,” the White House national communications adviser said.
Selenskyj at G7 summit: Seven Patriot systems are missing to save the cities
CBS reports that the first missile deliveries to Ukraine will take place in the coming weeks and that these first deliveries will reach Ukraine before the end of the summer. He described the re-prioritization as a “difficult but necessary decision”. According to this, orders for air defense missiles in the next 16 months, especially the Patriot, will be re-sorted: All buyers will have to wait in line for orders from Ukraine. According to Kirby, there is broad agreement among the countries concerned about the prioritization of Ukraine, as CBS further reported.
The ISW continues to believe, according to its own statements, that “Ukraine’s ability to defend itself against devastating Russian glide bombing attacks depends to a large extent on the country’s ability to attack Russian aircraft in Russian airspace with US-provided air defense systems before Russian aircraft can launch attacks on Ukrainian cities, critical infrastructure and front-line positions.” Romania has recently announced that it will also hand over a Patriot system to Ukraine, but has made it a condition that it be replaced by the USA, as decided by the Supreme National Defense Council.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Selenskyj and Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba have announced that they have ISW recently stressed that Ukraine needs more Patriot systems. CBS quotes him with a decisive request that he made during the G7 summit in Italy: “We urgently need seven Patriot systems – yes, to save our cities.”
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