We are now beginning to enter the stage of the war where Russia is unable to sustain a general offensive all the way up and down the frontline and must resort to terrorism to project fear and the illusion of unstoppable, corrupted power.
Expect more and more of this crap as Russia is less and less able to credibly fight a ground war.
Remember, acts of terrorism definitionally rely on propaganda creating mass panic for their power as if the perpetrators of the terrorism possessed true power they would have resorted to actual coordinated military action such as fighting on the frontline or taking territory.
In otherwords if Russia chooses to attempt something like this, it is by definition a sign of extreme weakness on their part as was the lazy attempt to claim Ukraine tried to assassinate Putin.
Tanks are always rare in war, and Ukraine doesn’t have enough of them too… I am pissed AF that my country (the US) hasn’t given more but I am confident the increase in artillery capability of Ukraine will have a strategic impact.
The M119/L119 is a beast and ideally suited for dragging around with HMMVs, if Ukraine can start getting a consistent supply of those out to the front that is going to have a massive systematic impact on the balance of power along the frontline. If I was a Russian general pushing the offensive on the frontline this would literally be the last thing I would want Ukraine to gain access to given how essential of a tool light infantry support howitzers are.
I am sure there are still awful shell shortages in Ukraine, war is always infinitely contradictory, complicated and utterly something you can’t know unless you experience it but compared to a year or two ago Ukraine is an infinitely better position in terms of artillery and in my opinion that provides a serious foundation of security for Ukraine.
Ukraine also just got a massive amount of German trucks to slap Bohdana cannons on, so production is just going to keep increasing for their 155mm artillery capability and honestly that should terrify Russians. Trying to assault a position with on call 155mm artillery support is an absolutely incomprehensibly terrifying proposition, especially because the only counter to it is to get as close as you possibly can to the defenders so the artillery stops firing… and those bohdanas are VERY accurate artillery pieces. Armor thickness considerations are also a joke to a well placed 155mm shell making armor design and doctrine for Russia increasingly dubious as a pursuit in the first place.
edit I am sure that German military doctrine is out of date, I am sure it must be infuriating as a Ukrainian soldier to see the ways in which foreign allied power’s militaries refuse to listen (the UK being one recent prominent example) but on the flipside I don’t actually think many of the assumptions of western military coldwar doctrine, nor of post coldwar western counter-insurgency doctrine are actually that far off the mark (in terms of tactics and technology not broad overarching strategy). Well… besides vastly underestimating the amount of artillery shells that western powers thought would be needed in a fullscale war with a neer-peer enemy, but that brings us back to the subject of Ukraine beginning to develop a dominant artillery edge.
My other biggest criticism would be I think European militaries largely failed to learn crucial lessons about how helicopters changed warfare and are still stuck a bit behind on that and thus Ukraine had to invent entirely new categories of organic close air support and forever change warfare to compensate for that blindspot…
Tanks and armor are currently unusable due to drone saturation they just cant move close enough in most places, even regular trucks can’t, we are slowly losing positions due this, when pilots need to move 10-15 kilometers on foot over fields it’s just unsustainable even with logistics handled by robots. We still don’t have domestic production of shells at least not full cycle I think and 4 years into existential war it really a big problem. Artillery is cool and all but there is no answer to fiberoptics drones currently (there literally none except shoot them or something) and they are extremely effective weapon that can be deployed up to 40 kilometers with 50 centimeter accuracy and cost fraction of what single artillery piece costs.
https://euromaidanpress.com/2026/01/01/frontline-report-2025-12-31/
^ Abrams were literally just used by Ukraine to successfully counterattack at the absolute most intense flashpoint of the war currently. Yes an Abrams was immobilized, but the crew survived and the operation was a success…
Fundamentally you really can’t get more efficient than a howitzer, which doesn’t mean that fiber optic drones aren’t devastatingly effective weapons but the difference is artillery can keep firing over and over and over and over and over again. What a lot of people don’t realize is the velocity part of the equation when it comes to the destructive energy an artillery shell imbues, the only real inefficiency is velocity lost to air resistance.
Yeah, I’ve seen this, cool shit, but in my mechanized brigade aemor crews were literally forced to become pilots of different unmanned vehicles due to bmps and other armor becoming one way ticket. Even modern machines like maxxpro are single use machines (they do work great and actually hold multiple hits) that can return but they are rare. Kozaks, hammers, various toyotas are far more popular for logistics and moving people to and from positions.
Artillery piqued in ww1 we never will return to 5 meterdeep trenches and walls of fire with million shells fired in a single day. 🥴 Not to say it’s useless but they require a lot of time to get going and actually hit something.
Well yeah, unfortunately Ukraine still has mostly an inventory of Russian design lineage armor. There is a reason Russians ride into battle on top of these machines, they know being inside is suicide which is supposed to be the point of an APC… Compare that to M113s which Ukraine still considers useful for armored transport roles even if the armor is light and the design is ancient as heck.
No, literally the opposite is true, if you have a reconnaisance drone and it spots an enemy 1km away from itself behind enemy lines… at that moment the absolute quickest thing you could possibly do other than launch a missile or direct fire cannon is instantly send fire mission instructions to an artillery battery ready to fire. Just think of this in basic terms of abstracted logistics, along the chain of logistics by definition artillery is the speediest “last mile/10km” delivery asset for a munition intended to be delivered to an enemy target.
The scarier problem artillery poses than response time speed though is that you don’t know an artillery barrage is coming until it hits there is no reacting, the very nature of an artillery shell is comprehending it only after it has arrived. This is the basic reality that forces modern warfare to be fundamentally about mobility, communication and reconnaissance not raw power and armor.
Drones have radically changed warfare, and are absolutely better at lots of things than howitzers but my point is that drones supercharge howitzers they don’t make them obsolete. This can be true even if drones are the best tools to hunt howitzers with, war is contradictory like that…
RL example of artillery working:
Same situation with drones: 15 minutes in 50 fpvs, 5 bombers worked, enemy is probably dead.
Artillery is situated far so it won’t be hit and they can’t stand in one place for longer then 5-10 minutes.