If this missile was deigned to hit a much smaller moving target e.g air craft carrier suggests something is very wrong with this class of missile and should of been withdrawn till fixed
In warfare you don't fight with the army you wish you had, you fight with the one you have. Paraphrasing some quote here.
That aside, the AS-4
can per-desgn be used in the A/G role, although clearly not it's primary. It's simply not as precise, as I guess one can infer from this sad demonstration. This does not negate it's usefulness against area-wide targets (thus my hypothesis).
Call it propaganda if you will, but these types of acts that
reek of utter ineptitude (the one that Feonor always likes to allude, about the shopping center in Kiev, seems a reasonable exception and there might be others that some are most likely willing to post in response to this) are playing in Ukraine's favor to: 1) convince Europe and the rest to get their act together 2) send more and better weapons and equipment 3) extend the conflict to bleed Russia's strength (we'll see how that works out..), geopolitical grasp and soft-power.
Yes, just as it happened to the US with their own conflicts in the middle-east; although differently as they did
manage to convince most of the world that their war was "just", not only in wording but making most of their allies participate. I find it rather amusing that we are comparing this, but here we are. In those terms, colateral by precision weapons seems much more excusable than, colateral by dumbfire of grad rockets, smerch and.. well, now this.
In my view, the defending side should be excused of such "propaganda" tactics, especially if it's existence is hanging on a thread. The fact that they where hiding stuff in a shopping mall while Kiev was being
virtually besieged in March sounds more like an act out of desperation than anything really tactically sound to me.
Then, as Ananda said, without western supplies this war would be over very soon, although I would not exclude the conflict taking another turn into the low intensity warfare kind'a train-wreck if that'd happened. I believe that Europe and USA
helping out, is also to
avoid serious security black hole in a hypothetic "occupide" unstable Ukraine that could bring very negative consequences to the entire region.