Ukrainian Drones Hit 26 Russian D-30 Howitzers In Quick Succession
Ukrainian Drones Hit 26 Russian D-30 Howitzers In Quick Succession
More of the 1960s-vintage guns are on the front line.
Scouring videos from the front line of Russia’s wider war on Ukraine this weekend, analyst Andrew Perpetua made a startling discovery.
On or just before Sunday, the Russians suffered their worst single-day losses of the war: more than 180 vehicles and artillery pieces damaged, destroyed or abandoned. That’s close to 10 times Russia’s average daily loss as the wider war grinds into its 30th month.
Incredibly, the losses include 26 D-30 towed howitzers, all of which were hit on their barrels by Ukraine’s explosive first-person-view drones. That’s one out of every 170 122-millimeter D-30s the Russian army had in storage before the wider war kicked off in February 2022.
It’s apparent the D-30 hits were all included in one or more video montages cut together by a Ukrainian drone unit: they didn’t all occur on one day and in one place. Neither did they occur over a long period of time all along the 700-mile front line of the war, however. The Ukrainians are blowing up a lot of D-30s.
The three-ton D-30 is a simple and effective weapon. Its eight-person crew can fire six rounds a minute out to a distance of 10 miles. But the 1960s-vintage D-30s began leaving Russian service in the 2010s as newer self-propelled guns replaced them.
The wider war in Ukraine reversed that trend. In 30 months of hard fighting, the Russians have lost around 1,500 of their 4,900 pre-war howitzers and rocket-launchers. Russian industry produces at most a handful of new howitzers a month; a shortage of precision milling machines for new gun barrels is a major bottleneck. So replacement guns have to come from somewhere else.
The Russians have pulled D-30s out of storage—potentially thousands of them—and rushed them to the front. We know this because there’s a tally of more than 100 knocked-out and damaged D-30s stretching back to the war’s early months. This tally doesn’t include the recent losses Perpetua identified.
That the Russians are losing more D-30s means more D-30s are in action. It’s the latest data pointing to a growing shortage of modern weaponry in the Russian armed forces as Russian losses deepen, Russian industry struggles to ramp up production—and Russian leaders persist in their cruel war on Ukraine.
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