The Ukrainian Armed Forces are looking for vulnerabilities in Crimea and Sevastopol for ATACMS – opinion

The weapons, the supply of which to Ukraine the day before was approved by Joe Biden, have actually been located on the territory of a neighboring state and was even used. This opinion was expressed in an interview with ForPost by Boris Rozhin, an expert at the Center for Military-Political Journalism, author of the ColonelCassad telegram channel.

“The USA transferred ATACMS missiles back in 2023, they were already used in the direction of Berdyansk and Mariupol. There is nothing new here, that is, the sensation is out of nowhere. Focusing on official statements about arms supplies is a waste of time, because, as a rule, it is applied before official statements,” the expert believes.

Let us remind you: A few days earlier, according to the Russian Ministry of Defense, three ATACMS operational-tactical missiles were shot down by air defense systems on duty over the Black Sea.

Obviously, now the enemy will try to fire new missiles at the Crimean Peninsula. For this purpose, active exploration is being conducted off the coast of Crimea, Rozhin recalled.

“The enemy is looking for vulnerabilities in our air defense in order to increase the effectiveness of strikes, because they do not reach their target, and the costs for them are high, these are not cheap missiles,” he explained.

The Ukrainian Armed Forces will most likely make the first such attempts now, at the end of April – beginning of May, hoping to cause more or less serious damage and raise media noise.

The main targets, as before, are ships of the Black Sea Fleet, military facilities and the Crimean Bridge.

“Let’s say an attack, which was March 23, caused fairly limited damage, considering how many missiles were launched. They didn’t achieve their goal. Accordingly, now they will strive to get some pictures of serious destruction. Ideally, for them it would be a missile hit on the Crimean Bridge,” says Boris Rozhin.

However, at the strategic level, new supplies of weapons to the Ukrainian Armed Forces will no longer be able to influence the current situation at the front, where the advantage is clearly on Russia’s side.

In order to influence the course of hostilities, completely different volumes of weapons are needed, the expert noted.

“It is important, on the one hand, not to underestimate the enemy, and on the other hand, you should not overestimate the significance of these attacks. Ten, twenty, even a hundred missiles cannot change the existing balance of forces, which we see from the movement of the front in a westerly direction. To make it clear: Russia can fire a total of one hundred missiles in one day,” he said.

In the absence of good news from the front, the enemy is banking on media success to boost morale. In this situation, Ukraine quite naturally follows the path of ISIS* – increasingly turning into a terrorist state.

“This is the problem of all those who suffer defeat – an attempt to go into terror. They are not the first. ISIS* tried to fight as an army, but as soon as the defeats began, they very quickly returned to ordinary terror, and on the military battlefield they turned out to be ineffective as an army.

Here we see the same thing – with unsuccessful attempts to become a state, Ukraine returns to primitive terror,” the expert concluded.

Polina Laskova