Himars strike wipes out Russian separatists’ HQ in strategic Ukrainian town

A Himars rocket strike has destroyed the headquarters of a pro-Russian separatist battalion near the eastern Ukrainian town of Vuhledar.

Alexander Khodakovsky, the Vostok battalion’s commander, wrote on the Telegram app that at least one Russian officer had been killed in the Ukrainian strike.

The separatist battalion has been involved in the months-long attempt to capture the coal-mining town of Vuhledar, in the Donetsk region, losing "5,000” troops in an attempt to take it.

In recent weeks the town, some 100 miles southwest of Bakhmut, has become one of the focal points of Russia’s renewed offensive as the Kremlin seeks to regain the initiative after months of stalemate.

Ukrainian military officials claimed that Moscow’s forces were losing between 150 and 300 troops a day in its attempts to storm Vuhledar as part of the assault.

Satellite images captured by US-based Maxar Technologies showed the extent of the artillery battle between Ukrainian and Russian forces.

Farmers’ fields are left in ruin, while the small Petrivka settlement, on the south-western outskirts of Vuhledar, has been all but destroyed since last August.

Oleksiy Dmytrashkivskyi, a spokesman for the Tavriskiy district of Ukrainian defence forces, said that Russia had likely lost a 5,000-strong brigade from its elite 155th naval infantry.

Dozens of videos have emerged of haphazard attempts by Russian tanks and infantry fighting vehicles to cross minefields, turning wide-open countryside into a graveyard of abandoned and destroyed armour.

One video clip shared online showed a Russian tank driving into a minefield and exploding, almost instantly followed by an infantry fighting vehicle that was also destroyed.

“A large number of enemy forces, including the command staff, were destroyed near Vuhledar and Mariinka in Donetsk Oblast,” Mr Dmytrashkivskyi told the Politico website.

“In addition, over the past week, the enemy lost about 130 units of equipment, including 36 units of tanks.”

Russia’s 155th naval infantry and the separatist Vostok Battalion, which Western analysts have claimed has been subsumed into the Russian military, have been at the heart of Moscow’s so-far unsuccessful attempts to capture Vuhledar.

Mr Dmytrashkivskyi said: “The 155th brigade already had to be restaffed three times. The first time after Irpin and Bucha; the second time they were defeated near Donetsk – they recovered again. And now almost the entire brigade has already been destroyed near Vuhledar.”

Vuhledar is translated as “gift of coal” and was built for a nearby mine. It sits above surrounding plains, giving Ukraine an advantage.

Tom Cooper, a military historian, described the town as “a big, tall fortress in the middle of an empty, flat desert”.

It has become a key area in the Russian effort to capture the eastern Donbas region because it sits near a railway that links Donetsk with Crimea, the peninsula that Moscow illegally annexed in 2014.

Late last month, Russian forces tried to cross about 500 metres of empty terrain on the eastern side of Vuhledar, in the hope of outflanking the defending Ukrainians.

Ukrainian artillery units hit both the front and the rear of the assault, leaving the remaining Russian troops in a kill zone.

Mr Cooper wrote of the failed assault: “Ukrainian artillery not only caused heavy losses to the advancing units, but hit their rear too – cutting off both their supply links and their possible withdrawal routes.”

‘Shot like turkeys at a shooting range’

The failure prompted significant criticism from Russian military bloggers, who have gained traction with their analysis of Russian failures on the battlefield.

Igor Girkin, also known as Igor Strelkov, who led pro-Russian forces in Ukraine in 2014, wrote on Telegram: “They were shot like turkeys at a shooting range. A lot of good T-72B3/T-80BVM tanks and the best paratroopers and marines were liquidated.”

Moscow Calling, which has almost 70,000 subscribers, said that the older Soviet-era T-72 tanks deployed in the area were not up to the job of taking Vuhledar.

“How are blind, deaf tanks, armoured personnel carriers, with equally blind, deaf infantry, supposed to fight without columns? And then how to co-ordinate any actions if there is no communication and situational awareness?” he wrote.

“If the Russian armed forces try to disperse, they will shoot each other because they do not understand who is in front of them.”