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ATGM Team Makes Direct Hit on Machine Gun Position
Published 2 years ago
There are two sides to this video. One side claims it's the Ukrainians taking out a Russian MG position, the other states it's the DPR taking out a Ukrainian MG position. This is like a video straight out of Syria in 2016.
Over the years, I've watched a few ATGM strikes. Probably close to 1,000 individual shots taken during the Syrian Civil War, and another 100 or so taken in places like Yemen and Iraq. One thing those videos all had in common was at the beginning, there was a plethora of armor on the battlefield to be exploited. ATGMs are technically and perfectly designed to destroy tanks, when there's no more tanks to destroy however, they make really solid anti-personnel weapon systems, and now we're starting to see that transition.
I wonder if this transition in target priority by the Ukrainians (If it is indeed the Ukrainians) is due to a lack of surviving Russian armor in their areas of operations, or if it's because the Russians have pulled a majority of their armor back to reconsolidate in the North due to on-going peace talks. Either way, should this trend continue, it'll be interesting to see how the Ukrainians start to utilize these weapon systems with a lack of armor on the battlefield. In Syria we saw them dominantly used as long-ranged sniper alternatives and as a means of destroying entrenched enemy positions.
On the flip side of the equation, we have many individuals saying that these shots were taken by the Russian Separatist organization known as the DPR. That would make sense, as the DPR has for a long time now been using ATGMs in this fashion. In the past, we've written about a half dozen of their ATGM strikes against Ukrainian positions. We can't say for sure which side of the story is true however, as the details on this specific video are a little muddy. If more information becomes available, we'll be sure to update this post.
