Marta Gichko09:46, 02.11.24

The Ukrainian army will be able to carry out deep strikes without requiring approval from allies.

Ukraine is as close as possible to obtaining a missile capable of hitting Moscow and posing a personal threat to dictator Vladimir Putin.

According to The Telegraph , Ukrainian forces are preparing to deploy a powerful ballistic missile, the Grom-2. The head of Ukraine’s delegation to NATO, Yegor Chernev, confirmed that the weapon is almost fully operational.

“Believe me, there will soon be concrete results that will be seen not only by Ukraine, but also by the Russian Federation,” Chernev said.

“Grom-2” – what is known about the Ukrainian missile

The Grom-2 is a single-stage, solid-fuel missile capable of carrying a 500 kg warhead up to 500 km. It is a significant improvement over the 1970s Tochka missile, which was Ukraine’s best such weapon until now. The Grom-2 has been in development for over a decade, but the project only gained priority after the conflict widened in 2022. Amid Russian attacks on industrial facilities in Dnipro, Ukrainian specialists completed the first prototypes of the Grom-2, and in August, President Zelensky announced a successful test.

The Ukrainian military will gain the ability to carry out deep strikes that do not require approval from allies such as the United States, Britain and France, which have supplied precision-guided munitions but limited their use against targets inside Russia. As a result, Ukraine typically responds to Russian shelling with far fewer munitions, mostly drones.

With the Grom-2, the limitations on long-range strikes are effectively lifted. The only remaining obstacle will be the speed of production of the new missiles. With the Grom-2 in use, Ukrainian forces are expected to be able to more actively attack targets inside Russia, although this is unlikely to have an immediate impact on the situation on the front, where the main problem for Ukraine remains a shortage of trained soldiers.

Will long-range strikes change the balance of war?

Given Russia’s vast resources, including access to a large manpower base, the Kremlin continues to regularly bolster its military, mobilizing up to 30,000 recruits monthly. The Ukrainian parliament, however, only recently succeeded in passing a new law on mobilization, but its capabilities are still limited, since Ukraine is a democratic country with a smaller population.

Russian troops, with numerical superiority, are gradually advancing along the front line. The situation is complicated by the arrival of reinforcements from North Korea. At the same time, Ukrainian strikes on targets inside Russia, although undermining Russia’s economic capabilities, are unlikely to change the strategic balance in the war.

Ukrainian missile production

Since the beginning of the full-scale war in Ukraine, the Defense Forces have been successfully using the Ukrainian development R-360 “Neptune”.

On August 25, President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke about the first successful combat use of a new weapon – the Palyanitsa drone rocket.

The development and production from scratch of the newest Ukrainian drone rocket, called ” Palyanitsa “, took 18 months.

During a press conference on August 27, Zelensky said that for the first time since the start of the full-scale war in 2022, the Ukrainian army had successfully tested its own ballistic missile . According to Defense Express, this is likely the Sapsan operational-tactical missile system, also known as the Grom-2.

(c)UNIAN 2024