A US-made missile has landed in Ukraine, wounding civilians

A US-made missile fired by Ukrainian forces injured three civilians in eastern Ukraine in September, according to residents and debris recovered from the site, marking a rare case in which US-supplied weapons have been linked to civilian casualties in 9 months conflict.

The attack, by an AGM-88B high-speed anti-radiation missile, launched from a fighter aircraft against ground targets such as radar and air defense systems, took place on September 26 around 6 pm in the city of Kramatorsk, in eastern Ukraine residents said.

The industrial city in the Donbas region of Ukraine was the scene of constant attacks with missiles and artillery since Russia invaded in February.

As Russia’s ground war in Ukraine has stalled, it has maintained a missile and drone barrage that has destroyed critical civilian infrastructure and killed or wounded many Ukrainian civilians.

In response, Ukraine has had to rely heavily on security systems. air defensesome of them just sent by the Western allies.

In a case this month, US and Polish officials said a Russian-designed missile that crossed Ukraine’s western border into Polish territory and killed two people was likely an air defense munition fired by Ukraine in response to a heavy Russian attack.

The war in Ukraine has turned into an almost endless barrage of ammunition, and it is sometimes impossible to verify the make and origin of the thousands of shells, artillery shells and missiles fired on the front lines.

But reporters The New York Times were able to collect and identify various scraps of metal left behind at the site of a previous attack in eastern Ukraine in September, providing a window into where billions of dollars of US military aid is being sent to Ukraine in the moments it can reach the soil.

“Three people were injured, they say. No deaths. It hit the apartment where nobody lives and in the next one people were injured,” said Olga Vasylivna, a resident who lived near where the missile hit.

His account was confirmed by witnesses.

“We’ve had luck in this neighborhood before. Now we are afraid of every little whisper.”

A spokesman for Ukraine’s defense ministry did not respond to questions about the missile attack.

The effort to protect the skies above Ukraine and destroy Russia’s air defense systems has taken on a new dimension urgency in the last weeks.

This month, the United States announced that two National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems, or NASAMS, which launch missiles that Ukraine’s allies have in large numbers, were delivered to Kiev, Ukraine.

Six more will be delivered to Ukraine in the coming years.

The arrival of Western weapons in the Ukrainian military arsenal has sometimes required a certain degree of improvisation and manipulation, in this case, to enable Soviet-era Ukrainian MiG fighters to fire the AGM-88, a missile for which it wasn’t designed. .

There are no recorded cases of Ukrainian forces deliberately targeting cities completely under their control, indicating that the missile is likely it was not on target and may have failed.

Russian troops, however, have often targeted civilian infrastructure and population centers as a central and repeated tactic.

To disguise its attacks on civilians, the Kremlin has often wrongly attributed some of those casualties to malfunctioning Ukrainian air defenses that have attacked residential areas rather than intercepting incoming Russian missiles and drones.

In this case, the missile struck the top floor of a five-story Soviet-style apartment building, exploded on impact, and punched one side of the building.

By late September, Kramatorsk was about 20 miles from where Ukrainian forces were attempting to retake the strategic Lyman rail junction from the Russians.

It is unclear whether the missile hit the apartment building because it missed its intended target and continued to fly, or whether the missile failure somehow.

According to two US defense officials, there was no indication that Russian forces in Ukraine had succeeded in capturing or using HARM missiles since the US began supplying the weapons.

Almost immediately after the explosion, images of debris and shrapnel posted on a local Ukrainian-operated Telegram channel contained manufacturer numbers and stickers indicating that the missile was a US-made AGM-88B high-velocity anti-radiation missile. or HARM. .

The next morning, Times reporters physically inspected a piece of shrapnel at the scene that contained an assembly number that connected the debris to an electronic circuit assembly used only in an AGM-88B, according to an online data database that allows the public to view US government property data.

Other pieces of the destroyed munitions also present at the blast site were consistent with older US-made missiles.

The AGM-88 was developed by the United States Navy and Air Force after the Vietnam War for specialized fighter aircraft performing missions to destroy enemy air defense missile sites.

Once launched, the missile looks for certain types of electromagnetic radiation emitted by radars attached to surface-to-air missile sites and pinpoints the source of those radio signals more than 30 miles away, detonating 40 pounds of explosives in its warhead. .

It is unclear when the Pentagon began supplying AGM-88s to the Ukrainian military.

But in August, US defense officials acknowledged that Ukrainian forces were using the weapon in combat.

Videos posted on social media also confirmed its use.

The intended target of the AGM-88 hitting the apartment building in Kramatorsk is unclear, but it is possible that it failed to find enemy radar and struck the apartment building after running out of fuel.

The missile will continue to fly if it misses its original target and will search for other enemy radar targets.

The Pentagon has long drawn on old stockpiles of equipment to resupply Kiev, sometimes leaving the troops of the Ukrainian forces with worn-out equipment.

A US official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak publicly about the use of the missile, added that the AGM-88B that hit the Kramatorsk apartment almost certainly came from old surpluses, having been replaced by a model newer in service with US forces.

The missile is just one of many munitions sent by the United States and other countries providing billions of dollars in lethal aid to Ukraine, and the Pentagon has announced four separate military aid packages for Kiev since August that include AGM-88 missiles .

A New York Times staffer contributed to the reporting.

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