It seems that the Sevastopol beach wasn’t the only target in Crimea that Ukrainian forces hit last weekend with ATACMS missiles. According to a report in The War Zone, Ukraine struck the NIP-16 Deep Space Communications site in Vitino, Crimea on June 22. NIP-16, roughly 73 km north and slightly west of Sevastopol, is the site of about 20 antenna dishes, including two arrays of 8 dishes each, and was originally built beginning in 1960 for the tracking of early Soviet satellites.
“Low-resolution satellite imagery obtained by The War Zone shows that it was indeed attacked. However, the quality of the images makes it hard to determine the exact extent of the damage,” TWZ reports. An image taken June 24 “shows new scorch marks in an open area of the facility as well as near an array of eight antenna dishes a short distance to the east. Additional scorch marks can be seen just to the north and east of that array. It is hard to say for sure, but if these were cluster-munition ATACMS variants, the dishes could be riddled with shrapnel. We just don’t know the extent of the damage at the moment.”
