A Ukrainian court sentenced to 12 years and 6 months in prison an agent recruited by Moscow to collect information on the location and movement of HIMARS systems in the Donetsk region, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) reported on Thursday, The Guardian cites. New Voice of Ukraine.

SBU officials note that although this man was recruited by the Russians to gather intelligence on the movements of Ukrainian forces in general, he was tasked with locating the numerous HIMARS launchers that Kyiv received from the United States and passing their exact coordinates to Moscow’s forces. .

According to the SBU, the Russian occupiers also asked the man to identify and transfer the coordinates of some key infrastructure facilities in the Donetsk region, in the context of the fact that even at the time when they managed to make the most progress there, Russian forces controlled only about 60% of the region in southern Ukraine .

Denys Pusilin, the leader of pro-Russian separatists in Donetsk, estimated this week that Moscow’s forces still control “a little more than” 50 percent of the territory of the so-called “republic,” which President Vladimir Putin declared annexed to Russia in late September. together with the occupied territories of Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson Oblast.

“It turned out that this collaborator was a local resident who, after the start of the large-scale invasion, maintained contact with the occupiers and tried to help them in the war against Ukraine,” SBU spokesman Artem Degtyarenko said on Thursday. look at the convict.

“He gave the collected information to the communications officer. He was a member of the terrorist organization DNR, which was controlled by the Russians,” he added, without providing additional information.

Even “Pravda” praised the HIMARS systems

The SBU’s announcement comes amid Russian forces having great difficulty tracking and countering Ukrainian-obtained American launchers due to their high mobility and the Russian military’s own problems with battlefield surveillance drones.

Although in the first weeks after these systems were delivered by the Ukrainians to the battlefield, Moscow announced almost daily that it had destroyed a certain number of HIMARS, such claims appear to have subsided after the American press wrote in late August, citing Washington sources familiar with in the fact that Russian forces fired missiles worth millions of dollars on Ukrainian-made wooden launchers as a decoy.

Perhaps few things are more indicative of the success of HIMARS systems against an invasion force than the fact that even the Russian website Pravda recently noted that they are “envious,” but Russia will soon have systems comparable in effectiveness.

“Pravda” quoted in this regard “military expert” and editor of “Arsenal Batkivshchyna” magazine Oleksiy Lenkov, who stated in an interview at the end of last month that Russian “Tornado-S” air defense systems are “a kind of analogue” of American ones. made HIMARS and will “soon become the main type of weapon” that the Russian armed forces will use for missile strikes.

He also noted the importance of increasing the survivability of Russian systems, “although by this indicator we are ahead of similar systems of NATO countries.”

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