The Silent Killer and "Shoot and Forget".. Weapons that haunt Russia during its war on Ukraine

Western arms shipments have been arriving in Ukraine since the beginning of the Russian attack on it at the end of last February.

As Kyiv continues to demand more of it in terms of quantity and quality, Russia continues to complain that the West is using its eastern neighbor as a battlefield against it and is supplying it with various types of advanced weapons.

With Moscow announcing almost daily that shipments and quantities of weapons owned by Ukraine are targeted, it is still calling on the West to stop supplying Kyiv with weapons if it really wants to end the war.

Russia's complaint about the weapons obtained by Kyiv reached the level of Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu naming 4 of them during his speech at the opening of the Moscow Conference on International Security in Moscow on Tuesday.

British intelligence estimates and media and military reports indicate that Russia's attack on Ukraine has slowed down and started to decline at other times, thanks to the weapons that Kyiv has now possessed.

In his speech, Shoigu said that the West initially began supplying Kyiv with Javelin anti-tank missiles and then the marches, and then moved to HIMARS missile launchers and howitzers, while stressing his country's work to destroy them all.

What are those four weapons and their capabilities?

Is it really credited with repelling the second most powerful army in the world, which has advanced military industries in various types of conventional and non-conventional weapons?

Javelin missiles

With the beginning of Russia's attack on Ukraine, the United States announced that it had provided quantities of Javelin missiles to the Ukrainian army and trained its elements to use them.

The Javelin is a US portable, guided, and anti-armor missile that follows a mechanism called "shoot and forget", meaning that it tracks the target on its own after launch, and the famous Raytheon and Lockheed Martin companies manufacture it for the US military.

The missile entered service in 1996, and with the launch unit weighs 22.3 kilograms, the launch unit alone weighs 6.4 kilograms.

The effective firing range is from 75 meters to 2500 meters, and the maximum firing range is 4750 meters.

The United States initially supplied Ukraine with large quantities of Javelin anti-tank missiles and Stinger anti-aircraft missiles (Reuters)

There are two ways for the missile to eliminate the target, the first when the target is exposed in front of it and it flies directly towards it, while the second is when the target is behind a barrier, then the missile flies to an appropriate height (the maximum height of 160 meters) to bypass the barrier and then descends on the target.

Drones

With the beginning of the war on it, Kyiv resorted to Turkey to obtain numbers of its famous "Bayraktar TB2", which had experiences and a major role in the recent wars in Nagorno-Karabakh, Syria and Libya.

The "Bayraktar TB2" is produced by the Turkish company "Baykar", a company that has been working in the field of defense and aviation since 1984, and is one of the manufacturers of unmanned aircraft in the world.

The company, which began exporting the first local march in 2012, signed contracts with 21 countries to sell “Bayraktar TB2” aircraft, and is also working on the production of a number of other models, especially “Akinci”, which are large planes containing 100 computers, unlike the “Bayraktar TB” 2″, which contains 40 computers.

The Turkish March Bayraktar TB2 (Anadolu Agency)

Since the beginning of the war, the Ukrainian army has been publishing clips of its drones targeting Russian army positions, vehicles, tanks and gatherings of its soldiers in a number of cities, especially in the vicinity of the capital, Kyiv, which Moscow has retreated from attacking because of the strikes its forces received on the outskirts of the city, according to military experts.

A number of volunteers in a number of European countries launched several donation campaigns to purchase Bayraktar drones to supply the Ukrainian army with them.

The drones are called the "silent killer" because they move without a loud sound and surprise the enemy by bombing them without warning.

HIMARS systems

HIMARS M142 is an American rocket launcher that was developed in the late 1970s, but it did not actually enter service with the US Army and Marine Corps until 2005.

On June 23, 2022, the first batch of HIMARS missiles arrived in Ukraine to be used at the front in the Donbas region in the east of the country.

The HIMARS system is a mobile weapon unit that can simultaneously fire several precision-guided missiles.

One launcher carries 6 GPS-guided missiles with a range nearly twice that of the M777 howitzer, which can be reloaded within a minute with only a small crew.

It is fitted with a large pod capable of carrying an ATACMS tactical missile with a range of 300 km.

The new version of the HIMARS 60 missile system that was sent to Kyiv is lighter and more agile, and it is installed on wheels that facilitate transportation without any trouble.

The launcher system provides protection against small arms fire, artillery shell splinters, mine blasts and improvised explosive devices.

Howitzer

The 155mm M198 howitzer, delivered to the Ukrainian forces, is a mobile field artillery piece that can be easily towed and towed.

Recently, the demand for these guns mounted on moving trucks, instead of traditional artillery systems that rely on tracked chassis, has increased, as they are less costly to produce, in addition to their ability to perform the same tasks.

A short gun howitzer placed at a steep landing angle, and used to fire through relatively high trajectories.

The cannon can fire up to 4 thrusts per minute.

The Ukrainian army relies on howitzers obtained from Washington and Berlin to bombard the concentrations of the Russian army (European)

The howitzers supplied by Washington to Kiev are distinguished by their being of the lighter type without sacrificing their range or accuracy, which facilitates their deployment and transportation in different and changing locations.

Washington has also equipped this gun with a GPS system, which allows it to locate targets easily and accurately.

These traditional guns, backed by US intelligence, in addition to images of drones, have turned into a precise targeting tool for their targets in confrontations on a long front extending more than 500 km in the Donbass region.