The Ukrainian military released a new video on Sunday, saying it shows the destruction of a Russian anti-aircraft defense battery in southern Ukraine.
The video was first shared by the Ukrainian Army’s Southern Operational Command Formation on its official Facebook page. The video appears to show numerous burning and smoking wreckage, including one near the start that looks like a nondescript truck. The post claimed the targets were a battery of S-300 surface-to-air missile systems operated by Russian forces.
“While carrying out fire missions, our missile and artillery units destroyed a battery of S-300 air defense systems near Zelenotropynske,” the message read.
Zelenotropynske is located in Ukraine’s Kherson Oblast, one of the southernmost regions of the country. The area is located just north of the Crimean peninsula, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014. It was also reported by Euromaiden Press on Sunday that seven “port and industrial infrastructure” targets had been hit by S-300 missiles near Mykolaiv, a port city located less than 200 kilometers north of Zelenotropynske. It’s unclear if the S-300 systems destroyed on Sunday were responsible for the strikes, but it’s unlikely given their dated nature.
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The S-300 anti-aircraft missile systems are Soviet-era military technology introduced around 40 years ago, with a targeting range of just 75 miles. Earlier in July, it was reported that Russian forces were increasingly reliant on equipment as old as modern ammunition has been depleted by the protracted conflict in Ukraine. Six strikes in Mykolaiv were attributed to S-300 missiles during the first weekend of July.
Around the same time, it was reported that Russia was also increasingly dependent on Kh-32 missiles, which were originally designed to sink ships. Versions of the Kh-32 missiles have been credited with strikes on a shopping center in Kremenchuk that killed 18 people and an apartment complex in Odessa that killed 20 in June.
Despite the original intentions of these weapons, with their stocks dwindling, Russian forces were forced to rely on the S-300s and Kh-32s to strike ground targets. To do this, they have been fitted with GPS systems that allow them to be roughly directed towards military targets.
“The Soviet Union built up large stocks of ammunition for its chosen weapons systems and the S-300 was replaced by a new, more advanced [surface-to-air] system. There will be a lot of S-300 missiles in the Russian inventory,” a Western intelligence report recently explained. “It would make sense from the Kremlin’s perspective to upgrade the S-300s with GPS capability and redeploy them in another role. But the problem is that at the end of the day they remain second-rate precision strike weapons and more innocent people will die from them.”