Ukraine boats about new super missile’s ‘flawless performance’ in attacking Russians
Explosive footage has surfaced of Ukraine’s new super missile in action during an attack on Russian forces. See the video.
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Footage has emerged of a new Ukraine ‘super missile’ being used to attack Russian forces.
In weapon delivered a “flawless performance” when it took on the Russian S-400 Triumf air defence system last week, in the strike.
The strike came from a Ukraine-made new cruise missile, contrary to previous reports the attack was from a British or French-supplied Storm Shadow missile.
“The missile was a new one, absolutely modern,” National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine secretary Oleksiy Danilov said.
Mr Danilov praised the weapon’s “flawless performance”.
How the missile was created has not been confirmed, with some speculating the weapon could have been adapted from a low-flying, subsonic Neptune anti-ship missile, which was used to take now Vladimir Putin’s Black Sea fleet last year.
The attack on the S=400 was a significant win for Kyiv because Russia used it to detect and destroy missile threats from more than 300km away.
Russian troops were also killed in last week’s attack.
“As a result of the explosion, the installation itself, the missiles and personnel installed on it were completely destroyed,” Ukrainian official Anton Gerashchenko said.
UKRAINE ‘LIBERATES’ STRATEGIC SETTLEMENT FROM RUSSIANS
Ukraine recaptured a village on the southern frontline where its hoping for a breakthrough in the grinding offensive against entrenched Russian positions.
Kyiv launched its push back in June after stockpiling Western-supplied weapons, building up assault battalions and attacking Russian positions.
With officials in Kyiv acknowledging progress has been slow, and Moscow claiming Ukraine is running out of resources, the liberation of Robotyne is seen as a major milestone in the counteroffensive.
“Robotyne has been liberated. Our forces are advancing southeast of Robotyne and south of Mala Tokmachka,” Deputy Defence Minister Ganna Malyar said on television.
Both settlements are in the southern region of Zaporizhzhia, one of four that the Kremlin claimed to have annexed last year despite not having military control over any of them.
Ukraine’s limited advances on the southern front have spurred a political debate in Western capitals over political and military support for Kyiv.
Compared to previous offensives in the Kherson and Kharkiv regions, Ukrainian forces are crashing into Russian defensive lines of trenches and minefields that are kilometres deep.
But experts say that the capture of Robotyne is evidence Ukrainian force can puncture Russian lines as they move towards the Black Sea.
Malyar said on Monday that Ukrainian troops were advancing south of Bakhmut and that they had recaptured one square kilometre there over the last week of fighting.
She also acknowledged a Russian push to take back territory in the northeast of Ukraine, describing fighting in the Kharkiv region as “very intense” over the past week.
A Russian missile strike overnight on an industrial facility in the central region of Poltava had left two dead and several wounded, Ukraine’s presidency said.
Images released by Kyiv showed law enforcement officials standing next to a large blaze engulfing part of a factory with plumes of black smoke billowing into the sky.
Presidential chief of staff Andriy Yermak said on social media that Russian forces had hit an oil facility in the town of Gogoleve and that two employees of the enterprise were killed.
The air force said Russia had launched six cruise missiles and that air defence systems had downed four of them.
RUSSIA CLAIMS TO HAVE DOWNED US DRONE
Russia says it scrambled a fighter plane to stop a US air force reconnaissance drone from crossing its borders over the Black Sea.
“As the Russian fighter approached, the foreign reconnaissance UAV made a U-turn away from the state border of the Russian Federation,” Russia’s defence ministry said on Sunday local time.
It comes as three Ukrainian military pilots, including one nicknamed “Juice” were killed on Friday when two combat training jets collided in an accident over a region west of Kyiv, Ukraine’s air force said.
Russian-installed authorities in Crimea, which Moscow annexed in 2014, later said two Ukrainian drones had been shot down over the peninsula.
The head of Russia’s election commission, Ella Pamfilova, announced Monday that early voting in local elections in the four newly annexed territories as well as Crimea would begin this week.
Previous ballots in occupied territories have been dismissed by Kyiv and its Western allies. Russia is holding local elections on September 10 for various regional officials.
TOP UKRAINE PILOTS KILLED WHILE TRAINING
Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy paid tribute to the men in his nightly video address and revealed that the three men included Andriy Pilshchykov, “a Ukrainian officer, one of those who greatly helped our state”.
Ukraine’s air force said there was no suggestion of Russian involvement, however, the accident may have been caused by the wartime reliance on old Soviet-made aircraft.
Pilot Andriy 'Juice' Pilshchykov, killed in mid-air collision, told Sky News in February he wanted to fly F-16s.
— Sky News (@SkyNews) August 27, 2023
Read more: https://t.co/IblhWPM0I3pic.twitter.com/aF9FH89Ixh
The English-speaking Pilshchykov was one of two pilots who went to the US to lobby Congress for F-16 planes for Ukraine, an effort which yielded results this month when Denmark and the Netherlands said they would supply the jets.
Pilshchykov’s call sign, “Juice”, was given to him by American pilots during a joint training exercise because he would not drink alcohol, according to The Guardian.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says one of the three men killed when two L-39 combat training aircraft collided was Major Andriy Pilshchykov, who won fame in dog fights over Kyiv during the early days of the war. https://t.co/ww6zdVc8la
— ABC News (@abcnews) August 27, 2023
A spokesman for Ukraine’s air force said thanks to the lobbying in Washington DC 120 F-16s could be flying early next year.
“You can’t even imagine how much he [Pilshchykov] wanted to fly an F-16,” the air force spokesman Yuriy Ihnat posted online.
“But now that American planes are actually on the horizon, he will not fly them.
WAGNER BOSS DEATH CONFIRMED
It comes as the death of Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner paramilitary group, following a plane crash last week, was confirmed by formal genetic analysis say Russian officials.
“Molecular-genetic examinations have been completed as part of the investigation into the plane crash in the Tver region,” said Russia’s Investigative Committee spokeswoman Svetlana Petrenko.
“According to their results, the identities of all 10 victims were established, they correspond to the list stated in the flight list.”
Among the other nine people listed on-board the Embraer private jet was Dmitry Utkin, a shadowy figure who managed Wagner’s operations and allegedly served in Russian military intelligence.
Speculation the Kremlin may have been involved in Wednesday’s crash has been rife, with the incident coming exactly two months after Wagner staged a mutiny against Moscow’s military leadership.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov described the incident as “tragic” to reporters on Friday, calling rumours of possible foul play an “absolute lie”.
Russian officials opened an investigation into air traffic violations after the crash but have otherwise not disclosed details about the possible cause.
The announcement follows revelations that Prigozhin was a Kremlin confidant catapulted to infamy by the offensive in Ukraine before he turned his troops on Russia’s capital.
Prigozhin’s order in June that his private fighting group march on Moscow to unseat Russia’s top brass presented the most serious challenge to President Vladimir Putin’s hold on power over more than two-decades.
His forces captured a key military headquarters in the city of Rostov-on-Don in southern Russian before setting their course for Moscow, where authorities beefed up security in anticipation of a showdown.
“The evil that the military leadership of the country brings must be stopped,” Prigozhin announced after claiming the defence ministry had launched strikes on Wagner bases.
But the failed bid ended with Putin ultimately offering exile in neighbouring Belarus to the mutineers and Prigozhin, who then appeared in footage vowing to make Africa “freer” and suggested he was on the continent.
Before Putin, who accused Prigozhin of treason, ordered troops to Ukraine in February last year, the 62-year-old mercenary head dispatched fighters from his private force to conflicts in the Middle East and Africa but always denied involvement.
That changed last year when he announced himself as the founder of the Wagner group and began a mass recruitment drive at Russia’s prisons for foot soldiers to fight in exchange for an amnesty.
He gained public acclaim as Wagner spearheaded the capture of several key Ukrainian towns including Bakhmut. But Prigozhin began blasting what he said was systemic mismanagement and lying in the Russian defence ministry.
Prigozhin was locked in a bitter months-long power struggle with the defence ministry as his ragtag forces spearheaded the costly battles for limited gains in eastern Ukraine.
He had earlier accused the Russian military of trying to “steal” victories from Wagner and slammed Moscow’s “monstrous bureaucracy” for grinding progress on the ground.
And he directly blamed Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and other senior officials for his fighters’ deaths, claiming Moscow had not provided sufficient ammunition.
Unlike Russia’s generals, who have been criticised for shirking the battles, the stocky and bald Prigozhin regularly posed for pictures alongside mercenaries allegedly on the front lines.
He posted on social media images from the cockpit of a SU-24 fighter jet and challenged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to an aerial duel.
The former hotdog seller and native of Putin’s hometown Saint Petersburg, who was jailed for nearly a decade during the Soviet era, for years dismissed he was linked with Wagner.
But last September, he conceded that he had founded the fighting force and opened headquarters in Saint Petersburg.
A video surfaced of a man bearing a strong resemblance to Prigozhin in a prison courtyard, offering contracts to prisoners to fight in Ukraine with a chilling set of conditions.
“If you arrive in Ukraine and decide it’s not for you, we will regard it as desertion and will shoot you,” said the man.
When video footage circulated showing an alleged Wagner deserter being executed with a sledgehammer, Prigozhin praised the killing, calling the man featured in the video a “dog”.
Prigozhin rose from a modest background in Russia’s former imperial capital to become part of an inner circle close to Putin.
He spent nine years in prison in the final period of the USSR after being convicted of fraud and theft and, in the chaos of the 1990s, he began a moderately successful fast food company.
He fell into the restaurant sector and opened a luxury location in Saint Petersburg whose customers included Putin, then making the transition from working in the KGB to local politics.
The company he founded at one point worked for the Kremlin, earning Prigozhin the sobriquet of “Putin’s chef”.
Prigozhin has been described as a billionaire with a vast fortune built on state contracts, although the extent of his wealth is unknown.
One of the best-known images shows him at the Kremlin in 2011, bending down over a seated Putin and offering him a dish while the Russian leader looks back with an approving glance.
He was sanctioned by Washington, which accused him of playing a role in meddling in the 2016 US presidential election, in particular through his internet “troll factory”.
Prigozhin at the time denied any involvement and in 2020 asked for $50 billion in compensation from the United States.
In July 2018, three journalists researching Wagner’s operations in the Central African Republic for an investigative media outlet were killed in an ambush.
Western countries have accused the private fighting group of coming to the aid of the military junta in Mali, in a move that contributed to France’s decision to end an almost decade-long military operation there.
Originally published as Ukraine boats about new super missile’s ‘flawless performance’ in attacking Russians
Read related topics:Russia & Ukraine Conflict
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