Defense Ministry spokesman Lt. Gen. Igor Konasenkov reported the successful strikes during a press briefing on Saturday. “As part of the battle against the batteries, two US M777 howitzers were destroyed in the Stepnogorsk region of the Zaporizhia region,” he said, according to the state-run TASS news agency. In May, the US gave 90 of the field artillery pieces, which are used by the US Army and Marine Corps, to Ukraine. The M777 uses NATO 155mm rounds, which is an improvement over Ukraine’s 122mm and 152mm guns. A Spanish Army soldier loads an M777 artillery gun during live fire exercises at the Grafenwoehr Military Training Fields on May 19, 2021 near Grafenwoehr, Germany. Russia announced on July 30, 2022 that it had successfully destroyed two of the systems it supplied to Ukraine. They generally fire precision-guided Excalibur rounds that use the Global Positioning System (GPS) to hit targets, and Ukraine has hailed them for their accuracy and power. Konashenkov also said on Saturday that Russian troops had destroyed Ukraine’s Soviet-era Giatsint-B and Uragan multiple launch missile systems. This followed strikes in the towns of Kodema and Belaya Gora in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, which is backed by Moscow. Newsweek has reached out to the Ukrainian Defense Ministry for comment. Russia has made a number of unverified claims about the destruction of Ukrainian weapons. Last week, Russia said it had destroyed four M142 High Mobility Artillery Missile Systems, or HIMARS, also supplied by the US However, the claim came just a day after the US said all systems it had supplied to Kyiv remained intact. Both Russian and Ukrainian claims of the opposing side’s losses have been met with some skepticism. Independent Russian news agency Agentstvo reported last month that the number of weapons and military vehicles Moscow claimed to have destroyed in Ukraine exceeded what Kyiv had in its arsenal. Ukraine has previously dismissed Russian reports of successful HIMARS targeting. Meanwhile, the weapons systems are proving to be game-changers for Kiev’s forces. They were used to destroy ammunition depots in the southern Ukrainian city of Nova Kakhovka and the vital Antonivka road bridge in the Kherson region, where Ukrainian troops are launching a counterattack. HIMARS can engage targets up to 50 miles away allowing Ukrainian forces to fire from long range and withdraw before there is any counterattack. A Pentagon official said Friday that they have prevented Russia from gaining air superiority in the war. So far, the US has delivered 12 of the systems and has promised four more. However, Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov said his country would need at least 100 of the systems to reverse Russian gains in the Donbas region. Newsweek has reached out to the Russian Defense Ministry for comment.
