Russia Has A Design For A New Mobile Gun Vehicle. But It Doesn’t Have the Parts to Build It.

The Russian defense ministry reportedly has approved production of a lightweight armored vehicle with a powerful 125-millimeter gun.

The 2S25M Sprut-SDM1 is what Western armies call a “mobile gun.” A vehicle with the firepower of the tank, but a fraction of the armor protection.

Mobile guns are infantry-support weapons. When dismounted soldiers run into an enemy fortification they can’t bypass or blow up on their own, they radio for a mobile gun—then protect the thinly-armored vehicle as it rolls up and puts a few shells into the enemy position.

Vehicles in this class are playing a bigger and bigger role in the Ukraine war—especially on the Ukrainian side. Kyiv’s allies have pledged to the war effort dozens of mobile guns, including M-55S “tanks” from Slovenia and AMX-10RCs from France.

The Russian airborne corps already has a couple dozen older 2S25s. The improved 2S25Ms could join these mobile guns in Ukraine, where they might be most useful supporting paratroopers in tough urban fighting, like that in Bakhmut.

The problem, for the Russians, is that the 2S25M might be hard, if not impossible, for Russian industry actually to build.

The 2S25M combines the hull of the 14-ton BMD-4 airborne fighting vehicle with a 2A75 smoothbore 125-millimeter gun and the fire-controls of a T-90 tank.

Those fire-controls include digital Sosna-U optics, which have French components. Foreign sanctions, which have tightened since Russia widened its war on Ukraine 13 months ago, have throttled Russia’s high-tech imports, including from France.

Modern optics are in such short supply that the only factory that produces new tanks in Russia—Uralvagonzavod in Sverdlovsk Oblast—is finishing just a handful of T-72B3s and T-90Ms every month. The Kremlin has gotten so desperate for replacement tanks that it’s been pulling 60-year-old T-62s and 70-year-old T-55s out of long-term storage.

Many of the tanks that are getting a fire-control upgrade—a few new-build T-72B3 Obr. 2022s and refreshed war-reserve T-80s—are being fitted with the analog 1PN96MT-02 sight in the place of the Sosna-U. The 1PN96MT-02 sees half as far as the Sosna-U does.

So if a Russian factory—reportedly Kurganmashzavod in Kurgan Oblast—is going to produce 2S25Ms, where is it going to get the new vehicles’ optics? The Kremlin could prioritize the new mobile guns for the tiny number of sights it can source every month.

But why would it, if the alternative is to manufacture an equal number of T-90M tanks?