On Monday, Russia’s defense ministry said that its forces had destroyed two U.S.-made HIMARS in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, and a launch system for Harpoon anti-ship missiles in the Odesa region, according to Interfax reports.
“The notorious HIMARS multiple launch rocket systems, supplied to Ukraine by the aforementioned military-industrial corporation, allow the criminal authorities of the Kyiv regime to kill civilians, destroy the infrastructure and social facilities of the still temporarily occupied Ukraine,” the hackers said in a statement reported by Life.
A Russian military expert claimed on state television on July 28 that Russia had come up with a “secret development” that allows it to hack into the HIMARS systems.
On July 22, members of Killnet said: “We are using a new type of attack, we have no equal in this area. This is a new technology that we are using for the first time against the world’s largest arms manufacturer—Lockheed Martin,” Life reported at the time.
According to a 2019 report from Business Insider, Lockheed Martin specializes in everything from global defense, security, and aerospace.
The HIMARS has been supplied to Ukraine by the United States, and the weapons have been touted as “a gamechanger” by senior Western military officials. The U.S. has promised Ukraine up to sixteen of the units, which can be mounted to a standard U.S. Army M1140 truck frame.
Each HIMARS can carry six GPS-guided missiles that can be reloaded in about a minute with a small team consisting of only a driver, gunner, and launcher section chief.
The range of the weapons is 80km (50 miles), almost double the ranger of M777 howitzers, another Western-made weapon that Ukraine has been using against Russian forces since May.
