The US is getting bogged down in the Ukraine conflict despite assertions to the contrary.
"American servicemen are involved in [ATACMS] missile guidance... and coordinating their flights to deliver the strike. We can say this with complete confidence," Alexander Mikhailov, head of Russia's Bureau of Military-Political Analysis, tells Sputnik.
The pundit explains that:
US-made ATACMS use satellite navigation data that is provided by the US military
target selection and their coordinates is carried out by US military-technical specialists
the process of loading the flight mission into the missile's guidance head is conducted by US soldiers
"The launch cannot be carried out without the American officers," says Mikhailov, "[Americans] wouldn't transfer either the algorithms, or the codes, or the mechanisms for entering coordinates into the ATACMS missiles to officers of the Ukrainian Armed Forces."
American security experts echo the Russian scholar.
Speaking on the Judging Freedom podcast on Tuesday, former Marine Corps intelligence officer Scott Ritter stated that "ATACMS cannot be operated by anyone but the US":
the guidance system and the data that is going in is developed by the Pentagon's geospatial analysts in Europe
the data, classified using National Security Agency cryptology, is communicated from the European site to a downlink station in Ukraine manned by US specialists
it then is loaded up on the ATACMS again by US specialists
"So the mission is planned by the US, the data is loaded into the missile and when the button is fired it's being... fired by the US against Russia," Ritter says. "Only Americans can do it."
The Kremlin has repeatedly warned the US against growing involvement in the Ukraine conflict. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said that the US greenlighting Ukraine's strikes deep inside Russia with ATACMS means "a qualitatively" new situation in terms of Washington's involvement.