War between Ukraine and RussiafileAfter seven days of attacks on Ukraine, Vladimir Putin’s army and their weapons began to become infamous. “Liberation” takes stock.
Russian forces are stepping up pressure on the Ukrainian resistance. After seven days of offensive, Kremlin troops flock to the capital Kyiv (Kyiv), the country’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, and the southern coast. But to cover them up, the blows continue to strike Ukrainian military positions and civilian areas. In addition to the air force, which now seems to have taken control of the skies, the terrible Russian artillery is raining deadly rain.
Along with nuclear warheads, some of these weapons are part of Russia’s deterrents. The liberation takes stock of Russia’s military arsenal.
Thermobaric missiles
This is one of the most destructive conventional weapons of the Russian army. Mounted on a tank chassis, these multiple rocket launchers, called TOS-1, fire so-called thermobaric projectiles. As it approaches its target, the rocket’s detonation causes fuel to disperse, which ignites and combines the effects of heat and shockwave.
This fuel “absorbs and burns ambient oxygen to create a more powerful, hotter and longer-lasting explosion than a conventional bomb,” explains Korii, the Slate website dedicated to new technologies.
These munitions were already used by the Russian army in Grozny, Chechnya, or more recently in Syria, in Idlib province, in December 2017.
According to Ukrainian authorities and observers present in Ukraine, Russian armored vehicles are equipped with these missiles. Photos circulating on social media also show some of those TOS-1s reportedly captured by the Ukrainian military.
Ukrainian Ambassador to the United States Oksana Markarova said Russia had used the weapon since the beginning of the offensive. According to a senior US defense official, quoted anonymously by the American magazine Foreign Policy, Russia has deployed these firing systems, which raises fears of deadly fire for Ukrainian civilians.
Rockets City
This ammunition is fired from a missile system mounted on military trucks. The 40 missiles that hit the target in a few seconds gave the weapon its name, a city in Russian meaning “hail”. They have a maximum range of 40 kilometers. At the beginning of the invasion, these weapons were used to target military targets, according to Ukrainian border guards. They are now being used to strike at buildings in Kharkov, where Ukrainian aid announced the deaths of four civilians on Wednesday. Many videos showing their use are being circulated on social media, according to one of our journalists present in Ukraine, Stefan Siohan.
The Grad missiles can be seen as the successors to the infamous Katyusha, those other volley missile launchers mounted on Soviet trucks during World War II. They were called “Stalin’s organs” because of the roar of their volleys.
Iskander missiles.
This huge ballistic weapon fired from a truck has a range of up to 500 kilometers. According to international observers, several missiles of this type were fired from Belarus at the beginning of the offensive in Ukraine. The weapon was used in particular during the bombing of Zhytomyr Airport, 130 kilometers from Kyiv, the capital.
According to the specialized site Missile Threat, the Russian army used this system for the first time in Georgia in 2008. The Kremlin deployed it in Syria in 2016, without using it in hostilities. Iskander is regularly located in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, between Poland and Lithuania.
“These deployments are a crucial part of Russia’s forced diplomacy,” said Missile Threat. From the Baltic Sea region, these Russian missiles are indeed capable of targeting NATO forces in Poland, the Baltic states and Sweden. The Iskanders are also part of the “deterrent” that Putin put “on alert” this Sunday in the face of Western sanctions.