Last week, Kiev forces used the long-awaited Himars – high-mobility rocket-propelled artillery systems – in a strike described by one official as a “jewel” on the Antonivsky Bridge over the Dnipro River in Russian-held territory east of Kherson. The attack rendered the 1.4km link unusable for heavy military trucks, cutting off supply routes to the occupied southern city from Crimea, the peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014. Another Kheimari strike over the weekend hit a train carrying supplies and troops from Crimea to the Kherson region. It killed 80 Russian soldiers and wounded 200, according to Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s interior ministry. Repairing the rail line could take weeks, a British official said. These strikes are just a few examples of the pain that truck-mounted missile launchers, with a range of around 80 km, have caused the Russian military across the battlefield. With them, Ukraine has fired on more than 100 high-value targets, including command posts, ammunition depots, air defense positions, radar and communications hubs and long-range artillery emplacements, according to a senior US defense official. “The word Himari has become almost synonymous with the word justice for our country, and the Ukrainian Defense Forces will do everything to ensure that the occupiers experience more and more painful losses every week thanks to these very effective systems,” said President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy. in his daily afternoon address on Tuesday. Four additional US units arrived this week, bringing the total number of Himars in Ukraine’s hands to 20. On Monday, the US approved the delivery of more Himars munitions, and Germany supplied three similar missile systems with a range of about 70 km. But Kyiv says it needs more of the advanced weapons faster — it requested at least 50 in March, according to a person familiar with the matter — as well as more ammunition to use them at the rate they want. Limited supplies have led Ukraine to focus on regaining control of Kherson, which fell to the Russians in early March, rather than trying to regain ground in the eastern Donbass region, where Ukrainian forces are outnumbered and outgunned, according to three officials who were informed. in the discussions. The Ukrainians used Himari to remove weapons caches and make it difficult for Russian forces in Kherson to resupply and deny them the firepower superiority that helped them advance into eastern Ukraine. “Without supply lines, [the Russians] it will not be able to maintain the level of bombing — their consumption is huge,” said a Ukrainian official. “They will be forced to use infantry, Manpads (shoulder-mounted missiles) — relatively light weapons.” Samuel Cranny-Evans, a military analyst at the Royal United Services think-tank, said: “If and when it happens, Kherson will be a major offensive that could give Ukraine momentum and an opportunity to reclaim the narrative.” Kherson is the only major Russian-held city outside the east, and its location on the west side of the Dnipro and its distance from supply routes make it a tempting target for the sprawling Ukrainian military.

The region’s porous front lines have left Russia’s 49th Army, located on the west bank of the Dnipro, vulnerable to encirclement, the UK Ministry of Defense said on July 28. from the other territories,” he said. A local official said just under 50 villages near Kherson had already been recaptured. But Ukrainian officials worry that the battle to regain control of the city may be the only meaningful counterattack they will be able to mount before winter. In addition to lamenting the slow pace of arrivals at Kheimar, Ukraine complains that it is limited to launching them only on its own territory. That prevents them from knocking out critical Russian infrastructure, such as the 12-mile bridge across the Kerch Strait that connects Crimea to the Russian mainland, an official in Kyiv said. Washington rejected Kiev’s request for longer-range rockets capable of striking inside Russia for fear of escalation. Kherson residents apply for Russian citizenship at an interior ministry office in occupied Kherson last month © Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters Ukrainian officials say they have been forced to hand out ammunition in a few strikes a day. “We know all the coordinates, all the locations of the Russian warehouses and command and control stations — [the lack of ammunition] it limits Ukraine’s ability to really change the situation on the ground,” one official said. Another said: “We can do a lot with each delivery to Ukraine, but if we are reasonable, we have to calculate them and compare them with our strategic needs — at this rate, we don’t even have 30 percent of what we need. We do not expect to have enough capabilities to plan any decisive counterattack for this year. Our main plans should be next year now [when stocks of weapons will have built up].”