Ukraine will finally receive long-range weapons from its NATO allies.
The US government announced on Friday that it would deliver to kyiv the long-awaited GLSDB missiles, a weapon with a range of 150 kilometers.
The White House had resisted during the war to supply the Ukrainian army with weapons that could be used to attack on Russian soil or even in the Crimea, fearing an escalation of tension with Moscow.
According to the current map of the front, the GLSDB could reach any Russian position on Ukrainian territory, except Crimea.
From the Russian border provinces they could also be used to hit targets in enemy territory.
The GLSDB are small-diameter, high-precision missiles, with a smaller explosive charge than the Himars, the most decisive weapon in the Ukrainian defense, with a range of 80 kilometers.
Precisely, the GLSDB can be fired from Himars shuttles.
The GLSDB are produced by the American multinational Boeing and the Swedish Saab;
Its initials, in English, respond to the name Small Diameter Bomb Fired from Ground.
They are designed to destroy precise targets, be they supply points for weapons, fuel or enemy command centers.
More information
Last hour of the war in Ukraine
The elimination of senior Russian commanders, based on information provided by NATO allies or partisans in the occupied territories, was decisive in the 2022 Ukrainian counteroffensives in the Kharkiv and Kherson provinces.
The structure of the Russian Army is very vertical, with little room for improvisation among the middle managers, as analysts such as the academic from the Kiel Institute for Security Olha Husieva or the French general Jérôme Pellistrandi explained to EL PAÍS this January.
When a Russian brigade loses its commander, the hierarchy is lost among the troops and withdrawal occurs, as Ukrainian military veterans on the Zaporizhia front explained to this newspaper this week.
US government sources assured The New Yorker
last October
that, when they provided information to Ukraine about the location of targets at the front, they never identify the rank of the officers.
"There are lines that we do not cross so that it is not perceived that we are in direct conflict with Russia," sources from the US presidency assured
The New Yorker:
"We are not trying to kill generals."
The Bloomberg
agency
reported on Friday that the minimum time for delivery of the GLSDBs and training of the units that operate them is nine months.
The United States still refuses to provide Ukraine with two types of weapons that President Volodimir Zelensky considers essential: ATACMS long-range missiles, with a range of 300 kilometers, and F-16 fighter jets.
Both these fighters and the ATACMS are kyiv's next diplomatic challenge to receive from its allies.
The refusal of the president of the United States, Joe Biden, to provide the ATACMS is such that even the twenty Himars launchers in use in Ukraine were previously modified so that they were not used to fire these missiles.
The supply of the F-16s is the hottest chapter in the negotiations between Ukraine and the NATO countries that support it.
The Government of the United States, being the country where this fighter is manufactured, one of the most widely used in the world, has the capacity to veto the exports of its units.
Biden has categorically ruled out that the F-16s can reach Ukraine for fear that their weapons will be used to attack Russian territory and Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula illegally annexed by Russia in 2014. For the Kremlin, and for the majority of Russian society , Crimea is an intrinsic part of its history.
The Ukrainian authorities are confident that the fighters will eventually be incorporated into their Air Forces, as did other weapons that had previously been discarded —so as not to raise tension with Russia— such as the Leopard and Abrams tanks,
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