Ukraine’s Ex-German Air-Defense Guns Are In Action, Supporting The Counteroffensive

We’ve gotten our first glimpse of ex-German Gepard anti-aircraft guns in Ukrainian service. And there’s a surprise.

The Ukrainians appear to be deploying their initial consignment of twin-cannon, tracked Gepards alongside ex-Soviet Osa surface-to-air missile vehicles—and shoving them far forward, close to the fighting in northeastern Ukraine.

This makes sense, given the Gepard and Osa’s complementary capabilities and the Ukrainian army’s urgent need for air-defenses as the Russian air force steps up its bombing raids in Kharkiv Oblast in a desperate bid to blunt a Ukrainian counteroffensive that kicked off earlier this month.

The video of the Gepard and Osa duo that circulated online on Sunday also helps to explain why Russian warplanes are falling from the sky in huge numbers in eastern Ukraine. Kyiv claimed its forces shot down four Russian jets in a single day on Saturday.

The German government has pledged to Ukraine 50 1980s-vintage Gepards that the German army removed from service around 2010. Reportedly, 30 of the 47-ton Gepards have arrived in Ukraine. There was no public imagery of the vehicles until this weekend.

The video that appeared online Saturday implies the Gepards operate alongside Osas in air-defense battalions belonging to front-line brigades. The 18-ton, wheeled Osa fires missiles with radar and electro-optical guidance up to nine miles out and eight miles up. The Gepard with its own radar can fire streams of 35-millimeter-diameter shells a distance of three miles.

The two vehicles could support each other. The Osa takes the first shot. The Gepard goes after any leakers.

Combining mobile SAMs and mobile guns isn’t a new practice. The Russian army’s Pantsir system has both missiles and guns. So does the U.S. Army’s old Avenger air-defense vehicle as well as its newer IM-SHORAD, an air-defense variant of the Stryker fighting vehicle.

We don’t have any visual evidence of Ukraine’s Gepards in action, but it’s apparent they’ve been in the thick of the fighting as a dozen Ukrainian brigades press their counteroffensive in the northeast. Earlier this month Ukrainian officials singled out the Gepard as one of the key enablers of the counteroffensive.

Following a couple of weeks during which Ukrainian air-defenses seemed to lag behind the front-line battalions, conditions apparently are pretty good for the Gepards right now. The Russian army is retreating. The Russian air force is flying more sorties in an effort to cover the withdrawal.

The Russian air force lacks large numbers of precision-guided munitions as well as doctrine for using them. That means pilots usually fly directly over their targets and drop unguided bombs. These close bombing runs should put them inside the firing envelope first of Ukraine’s Osas, and then the Gepards.