Recent footage surfaced showing a Russian soldier in the act of shooting a Ukrainian S-300 missile launcher at close range with a surprising result.
The video was published on a pro-Russian Telegram channel with a soldier using a PKM belt-fed support machine gun with an anti-armor incendiary round aimed at the missile carrier.
Russian Destroys Ukraine's Missile Launcher
After pulling the trigger, anticipating to damage the hardware or sending off a tiny explosion, leaving the launcher unworkable, The EurAsian Times reported.
According to pro-Russian video outlets, the man who destroyed the missile launcher comes from the Russian 255th regiment. The publishers asserted that none of the soldiers in the video were hurt. However, given the magnitude of the explosion, it seems unlikely that any of the unit's members were hurt, noted 6Park.
Each of the four missiles launched from a Ukrainian S-300 missile launcher uses flammable solid rocket fuel and has a huge blast-fragmentation warhead weighing between 100 and 150 kg, per The Drive.
Given that Ukraine is much ahead of Russia in information warfare, Russian soldiers may be trying to make the video more spectacular to grab spectators' attention by firing at the launcher from such a close distance.
Compared to the equipment used by Ukrainian forces, social media is flooded with videos showing Russian military equipment being destroyed.
Interestingly, this video depicts the destruction of an S-300 launcher, which would be the most recent in a string of systems lost by Ukrainian forces in recent months and a source of concern for Kyiv authorities.
Before the Russian invasion, Ukraine had up to 300 launchers and 100 operating batteries for these long-range air defense systems.
According to the numbers compiled by the military tracking blog Oryx based on visual confirmations, Ukraine looks to have abandoned about 24 of these launchers more than four months into the war.
The Ukrainian military received a large amount of air-defense weaponry from the Soviet Union, including six brigades, four regiments for the Ukrainian Air Force, and some more for the Ukrainian army.
A brigade may have 100 or more launchers and more than 400 operational missiles, compared to a missile regiment of four batteries operating up to 48 launchers with 192 missiles.
The slow and steady loss of Ukraine's collection of longest-range surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) may cause tremendous alarm for Kyiv officials because the more launchers that are destroyed as the war drags on, the larger the actual number of losses may be.
According to reports, Ukraine's air defense systems are losing nearly three or four missile launchers weekly.
Russia's Advantage Over Kiev
In March, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky asked the US Congress for assistance in acquiring more S-300 systems, emphasizing their importance and possibly signaling that the Ukrainian military may face a severe shortage of SAM batteries.
The air defense system was given to Ukraine by Slovakia, but the Russian Ministry of Defense has already asserted that it was destroyed using sea-based Kalibr cruise missiles close to the city of Dnipro. The loss of the vital Ukrainian S-300 missile launcher will leave Kyiv's forces open to missile and air strikes.
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