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With innovation and flexibility on par or even better than NATO’s, Ukraine’s use of artillery has surprised everyone – especially the Russians. But what Ukrainians need above all is ammunition. Published in conjunction with the Kyiv Post
After a year of full-on conventional war and millions of shells hurled downrange, Ukraine’s artillery officers and men have built up a pretty solid reputation for flexibility and innovation, maybe even on par with NATO – but the time they put howitzers on barges to win a naval victory was really outside the box.
The Battle for Snake Island
On June 17 two Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) cannon opened fire on Zmiinyi (Snake) Island, a strategic outcrop in the northwest Black Sea about 40 kilometres off Ukraine’s coast. Occupied by Moscow’s troops at the start of the war, the island had been converted by the Kremlin into a maritime fortification bristling with weapons and controlling shipping routes between Istanbul, Romania, Bulgaria and Ukraine.
Hitting the Russians wasn’t going to be easy. The coastline was swamp and wetland, and the closest road capable of handling a 28-ton howitzer was a good 80 kilometres away from even sketchy potential firing positions. The maximum range of cannon available for the job (38 kilometres, though just maybe that might be pushed) probably wasn’t enough to reach the island; and even if it was, the moment the Ukrainians opened fire they would face a real risk of one or both of their field pieces sinking into the bog.
As it worked out, sweating Ukrainian gunners had to battle mud and soft ground, mosquitoes and sunburn, but 13 days later the bombardment of Zmiinyi was complete, the Russians had sailed away, and military history had notched up another uniquely Ukrainian artillery success.
Day after day gun crews, drone operators, communications sergeants, barge captains and engineers teamed up to drag howitzers twice the weight of John Deere harvesters off barges onto a bit of dry shore, thump out 80 to 100 NATO-standard 155mm shells over the horizon at Zmiinyi Island, and then load up and sail away to a hide position and hopefully some food and sleep, before doing it all over again the next day.
In its later stages, reinforced with less-accurate, long-range rockets, the AFU artillery attack saturated the 1.5 square kilometre rocky island with high explosives. The Russians fired back but missed.
AFU special forces infantry aboard small boats landed a week later to find a moonscape; practically every combat vehicle, crew-served weapon, surveillance radar and supply depot placed by the Kremlin on Zmiinyi Island – where they assumed it all to be safely outside the range of the Ukrainian guns – had been trashed.
Ukrainian army commander Valery Zaluzhny was the first to announce the operation on June 30. Details were later widely confirmed by independent news platforms and Ukrainian officials, including a Joint Forces South officer in comments to Kyiv Post.
“The Ukrainian armed forces have proven to be extremely good at learning and adapting quickly. This might seem natural, but it’s actually a rare trait in many armies, including some in NATO who are stuck in outdated doctrine and dogma,” said Wes O’Donnell, a Michigan-based security analyst and military writer.
“Ukraine has proven the power of battlefield improvisation and willingness to experiment with new technologies and tactics on the fly. It’s a very entrepreneurial mindset, actually. Move fast, try new things, discard what doesn’t work, and adopt what does,” O’Donnell said.
That’s not to say that everything worked according to plan in the Zmiinyi bombardment. Plenty went wrong. The weapons used – a 28-ton Ukraine-made Bohdana howitzer and a 17-ton French-made Caesar howitzer – repeatedly got stuck, and at times threatened to tip over on their sides while driving on or off the barge. NATO-standard 155mm guns, it turned out, weren’t designed for hundreds of shots at absolute maximum charge. Sealing rings failed. Barrels got too hot and needed to cool. Rifling wore out. All that affected shot accuracy, causing more problems.
In 14 July television comments on the Orestokratiya news program, Myroslav Hai, a participant in the operation, said Ukrainian gunners discovered that the NATO shells – cleverly designed to explode over a target for maximum damage – were almost impossible to see if they blew up over water. That made shifting fire difficult. Even if a drone operator actually saw the shell detonate and wanted to make a correction, the firing data had to pass through a least two staff officers watching their own video of the shelling, and those two were fully capable of ordering the wrong correction. However, persistence, a nuanced attitude toward instructions from a ranking officer, and a common will to hit the Russians helped overcome those glitches, the reports said.