On the night of May 15, the Armed Forces of Ukraine attacked the Belbek military air base in temporarily occupied Crimea with ATACMS ballistic missiles.

Militarnyi reports on this, referring to local news sources.

At 2 a.m., Mikhail Razvozhayev, so-called governor of the temporarily occupied Sevastopol, claimed that Russian air defense started operating in the city.

Russian propagandist Fighterbomber (Ilya Tumanov) also confirmed the information on the missile attack.

The Russian Defense Ministry claimed that air defense intercepted 10 ballistic missiles.

Later, at 2:53 a.m., Razvozhayev reported that the attack was allegedly repelled, however, local Telegram channels started posting videos of a large fire and detonations at the Belbek military air base.

Besides, local residents published photos of M74 submunitions of the ATACMS missile that did not detonate.

In addition to eyewitness videos and photos, NASA’s fire monitoring service confirmed the information on the large-scale fire at the air base.

A comparison of the coordinates of the fires with satellite images indicates that the strike hit the aircraft parking lot, but there is no confirmation of damage or destruction.

ATACMS combat use

On May 8, it was reported that an oil depot of the invaders was hit in temporarily occupied Luhansk.

Leonid Pasichnyk, a collaborator and head of the occupation administration of the Luhansk region, claimed that ATACMS was allegedly used for this.

On May 1, Militarnyi reported that the Armed Forces of Ukraine struck a concentration of enemy personnel near the village of Rohove in the Luhansk region.

The footage captured by the reconnaissance drone shows a large concentration of Russian military personnel and the strike by three cluster munitions.

Visually, the area of damage and the number of striking elements are much larger than that of the GMLRS, so the strike was likely carried out by US-made ATACMS ballistic missiles.

Militarnyi previously reported that on the night of April 17, a military airfield of the 39th Helicopter Regiment of the 4th Guards Army of the Air Force and Air Defense near the city of Dzhankoy in temporarily occupied Crimea was attacked.

Two US-made MGM-140 ATACMS ballistic missiles reportedly carried out the strike.

The @war_home Telegram channel, which often publishes photos of the Russian missile wreckage, released photos of the missile fragment and suggested that it is the tail part of ATACMS. At the same time, Ukrainian media, citing their own sources, report that the strike was inflicted by modernized Soviet-era weapons.

The first official use of ATACMS in the Russian-Ukrainian war was reported on October 17 during the Dragonfly Operation of the Special Operations Forces.