- Ukrainian forces took out more than 100 Russian soldiers with an ATACMS missile, per OSINT analysts.
- Four ATACMS were used to target the group, one analyst said.
- The soldiers would have been out of reach of Ukraine’s shorter-range ATACMS missiles.
A Ukrainian ATACMS long-range missile strike killed more than 100 Russian soldiers in an occupied region 50 miles from the front line, according to OSINT and military analysts.
Ukrainian forces targeted a Russian military training area some 50 miles behind the front line in the occupied Luhansk Oblast in eastern Ukraine, per an assessment by The Institute for the Study of War.
According to two aerial geolocated videos posted on Wednesday by X user Osinttechnical, an account affiliated with the Centre for Naval Analyses, Ukraine appeared to strike the training area with three US-supplied M39 ATACMS tactical ballistic missiles.
Osinttechnical said at least one of the missiles struck a gathering of more than 100 Russian soldiers, with hundreds of M74 APAM bomblets falling on them.
Open-source geolocation project GeoConfirmed said four ATACMS were used in the attack, with the location being the village of Rohove in eastern Ukraine. One of its volunteers shared footage on X, saying that the four strikes happened within the space of a minute.
Business Insider couldn’t independently verify details of the attack.
The reported attack comes after the US secretly sent about 100 Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS, to Ukraine last month, according to The New York Times.
The US had previously sent ATACMS with a shorter range to Ukraine, but the versions sent recently can travel about 190 miles — which puts higher-value targets in Ukraine’s crosshairs.
An unnamed senior US official told the Times that Ukrainian soldiers already put them to use to attack a Russian military airfield in Crimea in mid-April.
Ukraine said that strike targeted the Dzhankoi military base in northern Crimea, destroying or critically damaging four S-400 launchers, three radar stations, air-defense equipment, and airspace surveillance equipment.
The longer-range ATACMS could prove crucial for Ukraine, as they can travel about 190 miles and hit higher-value targets in places like Crimea, which has been occupied by Russia since 2014.
Philip Karber, a military analyst with expertise on Ukraine, told Radio Free Europe this week that the long-range ATACMS have the potential to “basically make Crimea military worthless.”
The US sent Ukraine ATACMS with a shorter range last fall, which enabled Ukraine to destroy Russian helicopters and airfields behind the front lines, but not go after more distant targets.
