Kuban, a settlement in Luhansk Oblast in eastern Ukraine, is 60 miles from the front line of Russia’s 27-month wider war on Ukraine. Normally well beyond the range of most of Ukraine’s anti-personnel weapons, it had been fairly safe for its Russian occupiers.
This helps to explain why, on or just before Wednesday, potentially hundreds of Russian troops gathered out in the open in a field near Kuban—apparently for training.
The problem, for the Russians, is the Army Tactical Missile System: an American-made precision-guided ballistic missile that, depending on the model, ranges as far as 190 miles and scatters at least hundreds—at most, nearly a thousand—grenade-size submunitions.
As the Russians milled about in broad daylight on that field outside Kuban, and a Ukrainian drone observed from high overhead, four of the two-ton ATACMS streaked down. One failed to explode. The other three popped open and scattered their lethal submunitions. Each rocket turned an area as wide as 2.5 acres into a nearly inescapable kill zone.
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