Ukraine’s Giant Howitzers Have A Problem. Russia’s Own Huge Guns Are Faster.

Seven years ago, the desperate Ukrainian army—relentlessly pummeled by Russian artillery along the front line in Ukraine’s separatists-controlled Donbas region—opened up old warehouses and dragged out a handful of gigantic, ex-Soviet cannons.

Today those 2S7 self-propelled howitzers with their gaping, 203-millimeter-diameter barrels by far are the most powerful guns in Ukrainian service. They can shoot as far as 30 miles, outdistancing most other tube artillery in and around Donbas.

But there’s a problem for Ukraine’s gunners as a huge Russian force—100,000 troops and 1,200 tanks—assembles right across the Russia-Ukraine border. The Russian army has its own 2S7s. They’re more modern than Ukraine’s own 2S7s are, and they’re plugged into a faster fire-control system.

In a gun-on-gun fight, Russian’s 2S7s undoubtedly are better.

The 2S7 isn’t that old by artillery standards. The tracked, open-hull howitzer and its accompanying support vehicle entered service with the Soviet army in 1976. The type saw combat in Afghanistan in the 1980s and the Chechen wars in the ‘90s.

The Russians eventually put a lot of their roughly 300 2S7s in storage. The Ukrainians did the same with the 100 or so 2S7s they inherited from the Soviet Union. While a 203-millimeter gun packs a wallop, it’s also heavy, slow-to-fire, hard to support and painfully loud for the 14-person crew.

It’s not for no reason that the U.S. Army in the 1990s fully retired its own M-110 203-millimeter howitzers.

But the fighting in Donbas starting in 2014 compelled the Ukrainian army to reactivate a lot of older equipment. The army pulled at least 13 2S7s out of storage and sent them to the Shepetivka Repair Plant in Rivne for overhaul.

The giant guns can fire farther than most of guns in the separatist and Russian arsenals can do, giving them an advantage in counterbattery fights, where artillery on both sides of a battle shoot at each other. European arms-monitors have spotted several 2S7s on Kiev’s side of the Donbas conflict. The howitzers featured prominently in the above video of a 2016 Ukrainian army exercise.

There’s a problem for the Ukrainian gunners. The Russians still have 2S7s of their own. And they can fire faster and more accurately than the Ukrainian guns can do, owing to the sophisticated fire-control system the Russians have developed in recent years. That system combines drones and ground-based radars and electronic eavesdroppers to spot targets, and study radio links to relay coordinates to the guns.

In brutal fighting over the town of Debaltseve in early 2015, Russian 2S7s and other big guns hammered Ukrainian troops. “Ukrainians claimed that for every salvo they fired, they received 10 to 15 salvos in return,” Small Wars Journal noted. “Accounts of Ukrainian soldiers being targeted by artillery, just seconds after being spotted by a [unmanned aerial vehicle] or after making use of their phones, were numerous over the course of the battle.”

The Russians have warmed to the 2S7. An upgrade program for 60 of the guns, adding new digital electronics and other enhancements, ended last year. In 2017 the Kremlin began reconstituting defunct heavy-artillery brigades to operate the modernized 2S7s.

The Russian army now has more and better 2S7s than the Ukrainians have—in addition to enjoying a greatly-superior overall fire-control system. It’s a safe bet that if the Russians move west and widen their war in Ukraine, their huge howitzers will go along.

It’s not clear the Ukrainians’ own big guns can stop them.