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29 October 2023

Ukraine targets Russian airfields with US-supplied ATACMS missile

Zuzanna Gwadera & Timothy Wright

The United States has after much deliberation supplied Ukraine with Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) short-range ballistic missiles. The missiles, which are single-stage, road mobile and solid fuelled, will allow Ukraine to hold additional Russian military equipment at risk and likely force Russia to adapt its force posture in response.

Delivery deliberations

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy suggested on 17 October 2023 that the US had supplied his armed forces with ATACMS and the US National Security Council later confirmed this. The same day, Ukraine struck two separate airfields in Russian-occupied Berdyansk and Luhansk in its first use of the system. Footage on social media showed the launch of at least six ATACMS missiles from an unknown location using what appears to be the M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) launcher. The US has so far delivered 38 HIMARS launchers to Ukraine.

Washington’s prolonged deliberation over providing Kyiv with ATACMS appears partly due to US President Joe Biden’s concern that its delivery might escalate the war. This worry seems to have waned following Russia’s muted response to France and the United Kingdom supplying Ukraine with the air-launched SCALP EG/Storm Shadow land-attack cruise missile. SCALP EG/Storm Shadow’s range is considerably greater than that of the ATACMS.

The US Department of Defense was apparently concerned that transferring ATACMS would pressure stockpiles and lower US readiness levels. The official number of ATACMS in US possession is undisclosed. In 2020, the DoD budgeted to update 1,075 older missiles as part of a life-extension programme. Imagery of wreckage of a missile apparently used in the attack appears to show Ukraine has been supplied with the M39 ATACMS Block I, produced in 1997.

New targets

The M39 version of ATACMS is equipped with a 560-kilogram cluster-munition warhead of 950 M74 bomblets. These are effective against soft targets such as thin-skinned vehicles, fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft and concentrations of soldiers. The missile has a maximum range of 165 kilometres. Other variants of ATACMS have maximum ranges up to 300 km.

Ukraine claims to have destroyed nine helicopters in the 17 October attack, plus a surface-to-air missile launcher, multiple vehicles and an ammunition storage site and to have damaged an airstrip. Satellite imagery of the sites taken on 18 October suggests at least 17 helicopters, including multiple Kamov Ka-52 Hokum attack helicopters, were likely damaged or destroyed. Given the apparent dispersal area of submunitions, additional helicopters and other equipment may possibly have been damaged, though this is not discernable from the imagery.


The destruction or damage to these helicopters has immediate ramifications for Russia by lowering the number of rotary platforms available to its forces in the Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia regions. It is a further blow to Russia’s stock of Ka-52 helicopters given that, by October 2022, Russia had already lost at least 25% of its pre-war operational fleet of 90.


More broadly, ATACMS provides Kyiv with useful additional capability to strike Russian equipment that other Western-supplied weaponry could not due to warhead or range limitations. As the attack of 17 October demonstrated, unprotected soft-skinned equipment such as rotary- and fixed-wing platforms are vulnerable to cluster warheads.

Given prior US concerns, it is likely that Washington has only supplied Kyiv with a small number of ATACMS. Thus, Ukraine will need to carefully consider future targets for maximum impact, unless the US decides to send additional missiles in the future. Since the M39 variant is not effective against hardened targets because of its warhead design, Russia may respond to the transfer by constructing hardened aircraft shelters to protect high-value equipment, or by dispersing vulnerable equipment now within the ATACMS 165-km range to multiple bases beyond.

While such moves will likely decrease the vulnerability of Russian equipment to future Ukrainian attacks from short-range ballistic missiles, it will also probably reduce the time on station of Russian rotary- or fixed-wing platforms due to fuel and range limitations. If Russia constructs hardened aircraft shelters, Ukraine has other types of stand-off weaponry such as the France/UK-supplied SCALP EG/Storm Shadow that it can use to target these sites.

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