This morning, like yesterday morning, news began to trickle out that something had blowed up real good at a Russian airbase.
— Rob Lee (@RALee85) December 6, 2022
The Guardian has details:
A drone attack has set an oil storage tank on fire at an airfield in Kursk, the Russian region’s governor has said, a day after Ukraine appeared to launch audacious drone attacks on two military airfields deep inside Russian territory.
Roman Starovoyt, the governor of the Kursk region bordering Ukraine, said on the Telegram messaging app there were no casualties from the attack and the fire was “localised”.
Video footage posted on social media showed a large explosion lighting up the night sky followed by a substantial fire at the airfield 175 miles (280km) from the Ukrainian border. At daybreak a large column of black smoke was still visible above the site.
Much more at the link!
The Ukrainians have clearly decided, and rightly so, that they are going to prosecute legitimate Russian targets regardless of whether they’re in Russian occupied Ukraine or Russia itself. And they’ve decided to do so despite the US. From The New Voice of Ukraine:“The United States secretly modified the advanced HIMARS rocket launchers it gave Ukraine so they can’t be used to fire long-range missiles into Russia – a precaution the Biden administration says is necessary to reduce the risk of a wider war with Moscow,” WSJ writes.
HIMARS, however, are also capable of launching ATACMS missiles, which can hit targets 300 kilometers away. U.S. Department of Defense modified Ukraine-bound HIMARS to lock them out of being able to launch ATACMS, officials told WSJ.
The full US statement about escalation risks. Blinken also does not offer any elaboration on the report that the US modified HIMARS systems send to Ukraine to restrict the scope of longer-range attacks pic.twitter.com/el6nMsVE3W
— Samuel Ramani (@SamRamani2) December 6, 2022
I expect that this is a software modification that is reversible. Regardless, the exceedingly low risk tolerance of the Biden administration’s senior national security folks has now provided an information warfare and influence advantage to the Russians and the PRC. Whose proxies are all over social media talking about how unreliable an ally the US is. Promising X and then delivering it semi broken.
Here is President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump: