And in the early telling, it’s a stage of the war that the Russians did not anticipate, experts said. Russia has used cannons to batter its enemies from afar for three centuries, and officials knew that the U.S.-made precision missiles were coming for months, even sending a formal diplomatic letter to the U.S. State Department in April to try and warn off the Biden administration. There’s a reason that the Kremlin was nervous. The truck-mounted system weighs nearly 18 tons and can fire six precision-guided missiles at a time and then can quickly skedaddle, cutting into Moscow’s firepower advantage in massed artillery that is about 3-1 in the Donbas region.
Yet Russia still left itself open to a counterpunch. Early in the war, it left long, vulnerable supply convoys that were ravaged by Ukrainian sneak attacks during the Kyiv offensive. Now, they’re facing the same sort of ambush—from afar, while the vaunted S-400 air defense systems Russia brought into Ukraine have been helpless against the low-altitude threat.
Can Russia win a Pyrrhic victory in Ukraine? Maybe, though personally I doubt it. Can it win a non-Pyrrhic victory? Nope. That window has already closed.