Long-range missiles from the US head to the sluggish, brutal war in the Donbas. [View all]

[In It to Win It]

Vox

On Tuesday, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reached its 100-day mark, the United States government announced that it would send powerful new artillery systems to Ukrainian troops fighting in the country’s southeastern and eastern fronts, as well as radar systems and a number of additional weapons as the war condenses into a brutal slog to push Russia out of the Donbas and surrounding areas.

The four M142 HIMARS, high mobility artillery rocket systems, and associated ammunition, in this case the Unitary guided multiple launch rocket system or GMLRS, will supplement the shorter-range howitzers that the US, France, Britain, and Germany have sent to Ukraine in recent months and allow the Ukrainian armed forces to better keep the Russian military at a distance.

President Biden announced the new weapons and aid package in a New York Times guest essay, saying that the US would send “more advanced rocket systems and munitions that will enable them to more precisely strike key targets on the battlefield in Ukraine,” without mentioning specifically which weapons would be deployed. In a June 1 press conference, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl announced that the HIMARS, which can hit targets in the range of over 70 kilometers away, were included in the package, as well as five counter-surveillance radars and two air surveillance radars.

Russian officials, for their part, have claimed that the new weapons package represents a provocation from the west. “We believe that the United States is deliberately and diligently ‘pouring fuel on the fire,’” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Wednesday, claiming that, “Such deliveries do not contribute to … the Ukrainian leadership’s willingness to resume peace talks,” according to the Washington Post.

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