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A Ukrainian army BM-21 rocket-launcher.
Ukrainian defense ministry photo
In Soviet ground-warfare doctrine, which both the Ukrainian and Russian armies largely still follow, artillery is the decisive force. Tanks and infantry find, isolate and pin down enemy forces so the big guns can destroy them.
This was a problem for the pre-war Ukrainian army, as it was desperately short of cannons and rockets. An artillery army without artillery.
So it should come as no surprise that, when Russian forces first invaded eastern Ukraine in 2014, they massively outgunned Ukrainian forces. Ukrainian survivors of devastating Russian bombardment described Russian guns dialing in on Ukrainian formations just minutes after Russian scouts located them.
But the Ukrainian army has proved that it’s a learning army. And one of the biggest lessons it learned in the brutal fighting in the Donbas region in 2014 and 2015 was that it needed more, and better, artillery—and fast.
“Since March 2014, Ukraine has focused on recovering its artillery capabilities,” analysts Mykhaylo Zabrodskyi, Jack Watling, Oleksandr Danylyuk and Nick Reynolds explained in a new study for the Royal United Services Institute in London.
In seven short years, the army nearly doubled the strength of its artillery corps. In 2014, the army had just two independent artillery brigades with 152-millimeter and 203-millimeter howitzers, three independent rocket regiments with 220-millimeter and 300-millimeter launchers, one independent brigade with Tochka ballistic missiles plus organic artillery and rocket battalions for each of 12 heavy brigades.
That’s 1,900 artillery pieces and rocket-launchers, in all. Fewer than half the 4,200 big guns and launchers the Russian army possessed.
To add guns and launchers, the Ukrainian army opened up old warehouses packed with ex-Soviet hardware. The army formed six new artillery brigades and regiments, added artillery and rocket battalions to the infantry, tank and air-assault brigades and helped the navy form artillery battalions for its marine brigades. The Tockha brigade added battalions.
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After eight years of expansion, the Ukrainian artillery corps had 2,900 big guns and launchers. The Russian artillery corps at the same time had expanded to include around 6,000 artillery and rocket systems. The Ukrainians were catching up.
More importantly, the Ukrainian artillery corps improved its fire-control system—its means of spotting targets for bombardment—with new drones and radars, until this system matched the Russians’ own, ostensibly world-class fire control.
“A lot of effort was also put into qualitative improvement,” Zabrodskyi, Watling, Danylyuk and Reynolds wrote. “The use of the Kropyva combat control system—Ukrainian intelligent mapping software—saw an 80-percent reduction in the deployment time for artillery units. Simultaneously, the amount of time to destroy an unplanned target was reduced by two-thirds, and the time to open counterbattery fire”—artillery attacking artillery—“by 90 percent.”
In reality, Russian fire control was fragile—and quickly broke down under the stress of combat after Russia expanded its war on Ukraine starting in February 2022. By mid-2022, it was evident the Ukrainians’ fire-control was better than the Russians’ own system. That helped to compensate for the Russians’ greater number of guns and launchers.
If there was a weakness in the Ukrainian artillery corps in early 2022, it was ammunition. Kyiv struggled to stockpile the hundreds of thousands of tons of shells and rockets it would need for a long, intensive war. When the Russians attacked in February, Ukrainian artillery had enough shells for just six weeks of fighting, according to the RUSI analysts.
Ukraine’s foreign allies stepped up, pledging to Ukraine their own stocks of Soviet-caliber ammunition as well as more than 300 NATO-style guns and launchers that fire different ammo types—which the allies also provided.
Western guns and ammo sustained the Ukrainian artillery corps even as it burned through its pre-war stocks of shells and rockets and lost around 200 artillery systems to Russian action.
It was a near-run thing, but 10 months into Russia’s wider war on Ukraine, Ukrainian artillery finally is capable of doing what Ukrainian doctrine asks of it. Bombarding and destroying enemy forces after the tanks and infantry fix them in place.
