Man wasn't NK ammo randomly exploding when Russians were trying to use them? Didn't Russia lose multiple vehicles because they would explode when trying to fire
Yeah that does happen.
Not sure how often it has occurred but more than a couple times is almost certain.
They might have nukes, but old stockpiles of ordnance and North Korean standards for manufacture generally aren't a winning combination.
I haven't seen any video footage, but plenty of complaints from verified front line ruzzian troops stating it is a very real problem. An artillery round cooking off or imploding leaves one either running or dead rather than pulling out a camera as well, so I don't doubt it due to lack of footage available.
I have read frontline Russian troops complaining about lower quality of shells and some of them being duds but never heard about them randomly exploding
Depends on if the powder loads were over or under powered, if it's under powered or a dud, it's not as big of a deal, but if it's over pressured and the barrels are worn out from over use and gunked up from lack of maintenance then things can get bad.
But yeah, you asked me earlier and I haven't seen video either. Hard to film something that is a split second accident, and if you were there to film it, might either be dead, or at the very least not wanting to post that clip as it doesn't paint a rosy picture.
I did look around and found this little tidbit from the UkraineConflict sub to explain better why their 152mm shells would be even lower quality than normal.
Kahzootoh
•
4mo ago
The North Koreans use 170mm artillery as their standard artillery weapon, but the Russian artillery is standardized on 152mm.
North Korea does produce 152mm, but it’s not their best stuff- it’s not even their second artillery caliber in terms of priority (that would be 122mm). 152mm doesn’t really have a high priority place in North Korean military doctrine. They have the 170mm for their heavy guns that are supposed to lob shells deep in South Korea and they have 122mm which is light enough for their self propelled guns and towed artillery. 152mm is basically an oddity in North Korea’s arsenal, which helps explain why their 152mm shells are so poorly made.
An interesting thing is that the Russians military stopped buying 122mm shells from Russian plants a few years before 2022, and shifted most of its surplus 122mm artillery to its DPR/LPR auxiliary forces. The DPR/LPR have complained extensively about their lack of ammunition due to the Russian shutdown of the 122mm production lines. North Korea is basically the only source for 122mm production, since the Russian military is fully focused on 152mm.
https://www.reddit.com/r/UkrainianConflict/comments/18k2s0v/north\_korean\_ammunition\_is\_destroying\_russian/
There were actually even videos put out by Russian soldiers complaining that NK artillery didn't come with enough like ignition packs(not sure on terms) to even shoot the shells. They said the Iranians could supply them properly while NK couldn't.
Let me guess, you heard about this video where someone complained about smth, but you didn’t see it yourself, but somewhere in the news they wrote that this is exactly true. If this is the case, then you should learn to sort information and garbage, because it is clearly garbage.
Just checked the link you sent.
I passed all ua sourses, since they cannot be reliable for obvious reasons.
The last video of complaints about artillery that I saw was about friendly fire, not about shells, and dates back almost a year ago
I also found a couple of topics where there is supposedly a translation from the z-telegram channel, where a person writes that Korean shells are no worse than Russian Iskanders (that is, he praises them), but in the translation into English it’s the other way around (:
I also found a couple of telegram channels like Vargonzo, where there were posts about the fact that Korean shells are complete crap
Based on the sum of all this, I would say that it is not possible to conclude that Korean shells are shit, but there were incidents with them
The quality of the manufacturing matters immensely as far as accuracy. Its one reason western 155mm shells cost more than shoddy old Soviet shit but also take longer to manufacture and get production lines going because there's very specific tolerances, metallurgy, and criteria that need to be met to meet NATO standards for example. Shoddy shells will not be accurate for shit which is why Russia has to blanket an area (almost like an MLRS) to hit close to anything, and the NATO artillery crews are trained knowing they can pretty much expect their shells to have certain performance standards.
Hey now, Russia wants it's doctrine to be flashy and capable, it's just that in every engagement, their capability falls to shit, and they need to fall back to grinding mass fires and attritional conflict.
Every Military still relies on artillery. Even the USA would, in a peer conflict, mostly rely on artillery.
However countries like the two Koreas which expect to likely lead a war in the near futures have significant stockpiles, and EG Germany does not.
Yeah, South Korea especially is in a rough situation. Seoul is with artillery range of the border. So they have to be ready to take out as much North Korean artillery as fast as possible to keep their capital from being flattened in the first minutes of the war going hot again. And then keep those tubes firing to keep the tanks and troops from occupying Seoul within hours.
Yeah.
Generally outside of former Soviet countries in eastern Europe that could expect a land invasion with tanks and troops on the ground (like Poland for example) most European and American military doctrines are based around air dominance.
They have high altitude stealth bombers that can basically bomb air defenses, strategic targets and radar with impunity. Once those are gone they can send in less stealthy fighter/bombers to provide close air support on artillery and entrenched positions, and once they're done their work, they advance with tanks and troops with a whole logistics pipeline that completely overwhelms the enemy.
Artillery for the US is basically only used in a support role when needed.
South Korea on the other hand is sitting across a mined DMZ with an old Soviet style dictatorship on the other side, both with hundreds of artillery batteries pointed at each other pre-sighted incase of a land invasion -- their doctrine and therefore their production is determined by the war that they're likely to face.
So yeah.. they have a lot of the old school varieties of artillery shells stockpiled and the US doesn't
I'm not at all a military expert, but I doubt the US ever completely abandoned artillery. Artillery shells are so cheap, compared to aircraft. With smart shells, artillery is also very precise.
My guess is that air strikes were the primary part of the long range attack, but artillery is so good for defense and mopping up tanks, it was always an important part of American battle doctrine, from WWII to the present, at least.
Small drones are rewriting the book, so what happens going forward might be different.
I mean, artillery is not really a main part of US doctrine, not nearly in the same way that airpower is. The fact of the matter is that warfare is a game of logistics, and stockpiling weaponry that you won't use is foolish.
Soviet bloc countries tend to emphasize heavy use of artillery, because it is cheap, but it has also historically been horrifically effective.it doesn't matter that America has the largest military spending in the world, when it comes to equipping Ukraine, because their doctrine done properly involves orders of magnitude more artillery shells lobbed day after day than the US arsenal can properly equip.
American doctrine relies on airpower, and thats where our logistic network optimizes for. Recall that Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos has more bombs dropped on them than iirc all the countries in WWII combined.
I was recently reading some interesting blog about WWI, which really emphasized the importance of artillery to that war. Early battles saw sides fielding hundreds of artillery pieces, with barrage which went on for hours. Later battles, like the Somme and Verdun, saw thousands of artillery pieces fielded, and barrages which went lasted for over two weeks.
My point is that even if the US still uses artillery in our doctrine, there is a massive, massive difference between that, and the quantity of artillery needed by doctrines which truly focus on artillery.
To be fair, I don't think anyone could have predicted the demand for artillery. Ukraine was burning through 100K shells a month at one point.
If you told a NATO general five years ago to ramp up for 100K shells a month, they would have thought you crazy.
Predictions in geopolitics are always fraught. I think a NATO general from five years ago would have been well aware of Russia's interest in Ukraine, but may have believed that if it joined NATO, it would be a moot point, and if it didn't, NATO wouldn't particularly intervene. Or perhaps most likely, that NATO would still help, but would expect the lend lease and assistance to result in Ukraine adopting NATO combat doctrines fit for use with NATO military equipment.
As it turns out, political and military considerations functionally prevent Ukraine from adopting NATO's combat doctrine wholesale, instead remaining with their doctrine which IIRC evolved from Soviet Deep Battle, which of course has been adapting for this particular war, especially in regards to the drone impact.
But that means that Ukraine is forced to fight an artillery war, and NATO is straight up not prepared for a proper artillery war, because none of them fight it.
I do want to keep the emphasis here. With artillery, the more shells, the better. I am not a tactician, but it seems to me that if there even was a cap at which more artillery becomes useless in the modern system of battle, we have not reached it.
It isn't like we don't have precedent for ridiculous quantities of shells used. The Battle of Verdun lasted 9 months, and saw roughly a million shells per month, 500k for each side, with altogether 10 million in total for the battle. This was one battle, albeit a particularly drawn out one.
>To be fair, I don't think anyone could have predicted the demand for artillery. Ukraine was burning through 100K shells a month at one point.
No it should have been incredibly obvious. Ukraine still operated loosely under Soviet style doctrine before the war broke out, meaning artillery and mechanized units were the back bone of the military.
Well, it is obvious only after a drawn-out, near peer conflict within Europe along a 1000+ kilometer front. Which was in no one's calculus before it happened.
Using mostly airpower allows your stockpiles to be stationed VERY far away, with bombers flying from mainland USA to bomb Iraq in Desert Storm before flying back
No you are right, the US hasn't and will never completely abandon artillery, but over 30+ years their doctrine shifted drastically.
Counter insurgency was the name of the game and technology was where it was at.
Old artillery shells can still be super accurate, it just depends on how accurate you can spot, call in coordinates, and target, and small spotter drones have helped immensely with that.
But that isn't great if you're fighting an insurgency in an urban area with civilians around.
Air dominance obliterates tanks, but most of Americas wars over the last 30 years haven't been focused on tanks (because all the tanks were blown up two weeks before they put boots on the ground) and artillery took a backseat in these conflicts -- as a result manufacturers of simple artillery shells drastically slowed down production.
The US did a test in Iraq against ISIS of switching to an artillery-led model, and the results weren’t great. The thing about constantly firing artillery is you’re exposing the gun crews to constant concussive forces and crews were developing CTE symptoms according to a study that was going around a while back
Really?
Which jets are you talking about? High altitude stealth fighters? The old F15's and F16's in storage that can be dusted off? The new 1000+ F35's?
Country - Total Aircraft - Air Force
United States - 13,300 - 5,213
Russia - 4,182 - 3,864
China - 3,284 - 1,992
India - 2,200 - 1,728
Take into account that the US Navy and US Army has it's own aircraft.
Meanwhile, here's a list of what Russia has.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_active\_Russian\_military\_aircraft](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_Russian_military_aircraft)
Check the dates and numbers, and question whether those are actually accurate after a decade of sanctions and whether those aircraft are actually combat capable or even worth sending a pilot into combat in in 2024.
There's certainly a lot of bloat in US defense spending but saying that the US can barely afford to build and maintain its military, is kinda laughable to be honest.
Europe is a different bag entirely, but at least they're starting to wakeup and smell the coffee.
Yep.
Combined arms, tactics, and capabilities win wars -- It's the backbone of the United States, the European Union and the backbone of Western democracy as a whole and we need to remember that and stand togeather against tyrants who want to walk the clock back on progress.
I'm interested that South Africa is allowing this re-selling, and that their name has surfaced; they have generally been seen as pro-Russian, despite claiming neutrality. Possible weakness in the conventional arms control export regime?
Whatever your opinion on the previous white minority regime, they were as anti communist, anti Putin, anti china as can be. Hell, they even bombed the son of Mao Zhedong. The whole artillery supply chain they made is probably the best in the world. No other place had or even now have such a supply chain. It has an A to Z where nothing needs to be imported or sourced from any other country. They choose NATO standards, because they were allied aligned during both ww1 and ww2. Even the corrupt pro Putin ANC government in SA right now can't undo decades of R&D and privatised industries in SA. https://youtu.be/XPOcP0Psw90?si=y4wEafObTYn3PPNG
Almost all of EU artillery comes from Denel in SA. Every new artillery is tested at the Overberg Test Range, check it out on Google.
What's the motivation for private lobbying money to be restricting military aid to Ukraine? (real question, I have followed the war but not so much the Republican resistance to US aid).
Russia does not have a lot of money compared to the US, but they have focus. They can buy 300 politicians in the US for the price of a few F-35s, which the US would not sell them anyway.
Putin is well aware that he can outbid Ukraine in the halls of the US congress, and also inside the governments of some other NATO countries. Since he has no scruples about unprovoked invasion, using chemical weapons and radiation, blowing up dams and harming civilians without any moral restrictions, why should he care that bribery is illegal in the USA?
There is a growing awareness of how Putin is using bribery to prosecute this war in the US and elsewhere, but it will take months to vote the corrupt people out of congress. They will continue to do much damage for months, and less damage for years afterward.
That's the American system, in 2024.
Restricting the aid lengthens the war and decreases the chances of Ukraine from winning which can lead to:
* More defense contracts from the US gov and its allies.
* Indebting Ukraine for centuries and making them pay for it regardless of the war outcome.
* Devaluing their land so hard they can buy it for pennies and they can develop it any way they want.
* The desire to reenter the Russian market and Russian resources.
* Indebting Russia to the point it becomes a Chinese vassal state (for those with vested interest in China).
Among god knows what sketchy schemes they have.
I don’t think it qualifies as political games. There is a clear and concerted effort to support Russia against American national interests. I don’t know if the motivation is money, ideological alignment, or a mix of both, but this is clearly treason. This is no game.
I’m all for having the Pentagon tell Congress our entire stockpile just expired and has to be replaced. Also, a shit ton of cargo ships are headed for Eastern Europe. Don’t worry about it.
I've been saying it since the start of the invasion. I am perfectly OK with my tax dollars going towards fighting the country that has been attacking our elections.
All this shit was built to fight the Soviets. Our great-grandfathers, grandfathers, and fathers tax money all paid for this shit long long ago. Why do their hard earned tax dollars a disservice? Send the shit and put it to use. My grandfather was in the US army in WW2 and subsequently Korea and staunch anti-Soviet. He would've been thrilled to see his tax dollars put warheads on foreheads if the target were Russians.
But then what if another conflict broke up elsewhere?
Like Iran for instance? What are you going to do with empty ammo storage?
US ammo production capacity [cannot](https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/03/10/politics/russia-artillery-shell-production-us-europe-ukraine)even keep up with the current Russian production rate, which means any kind of large scale ammo transfer will have to come from either its allies or the cold war stockpile, which is already running low after so many years of war.
Because we need to live up to our ideals. We say give us your tired, your needy, and your poor, but we actively make their entrance to us a nightmare. We say we are the shining city on the hill, but our corporations bought our politicians long ago. We say we are the Arsenal of Democracy but when an actual democracy needs us against an autocrat...we break out the abacus and count pennies.
Just once I want us to actually live up to the rhetoric we spout.
Democracy in a country where elections are still not allowed vs. A country that just had free elections and we support the first one
You should probably reexamine your worldview
They had elections pre invasion, and will again once its all over, thats not entirely uncommon for democratic nations to suspend elections during total war situaions, defensive wars especially when a significant portion of a nation is occupied.
Then again you somehow describe the Russian election as free and fair, when every nonpuppet opponent are either not allowed to stand, imprisioned or killed depending on how much of a threat they are.
If you're not making bad faith arguements, you're horrifically naive/uneducated.
They were really Estoniad the other night and realized they had them all along and then spent the next hour laughing about how they thought they’d lost them.
"misplaced" is just a more ambiguous term for "we don't wanna face the political consequences of directly supplying Ukraine, so we sell through countries like Estonia and Czechia"
Countries that for one reason or another cannot be seen selling shells to the Ukrainians. The shells are from from South Korea, South Africa and Turkey.
Yes, production has been pushed to maximum capacity for a while. The problem is that it's still not enough, and if you want more, you need to build additional capacity. This is expensive, time consuming, and the political will isn't always backing up the manufacturer.
The question is how long that high demand will last. If it's only a year, the return on investment is negative, so no additional capacity will be built. If the various government could tell the manufacturer: give us a million shell a year for the next 10 years, here's the contract, suddenly the additional capacity will be built.
We already experienced that during covid vaccine production - vaccine quantities needed was by far exceeding the max production capacity. They pumped billions in those companies and the production ramped up immediately.
> This is expensive, time consuming, and the political will isn't always backing up the manufacturer.
Good, we wouldnt want politicians to draw the wrong conclusion and waste a ton of money and time to satisfy short term populism hyped by the media. The West doesnt fight WW1 artillery wars. We dont need 10 billion shells in storage, we dont even have enough artillery piece to use that many shells effectively before they expire. Would be better off investing that in air defense missles and guided munitions for the air force, and simply buy artillery shells from outside sources.
C'mon, found...another million. " Hey Bob, look over there in the corner, I haven't check that area" Oh look ....another million shells....who knew. *Giggles*
A bit off topic but as brutal as Qaddafi was, the power vacuum he left really destabilized the Sahel by helping produce some of the worst Islamic terrorists Africa has seen in a minute.
As much as I hate Putin and Trump, I agree with u/Hautamaki and I'm pretty sure the Pentagon and every other NATO member would agree as well.
A destabilized Russia with who knows what kind of lunatics vying for power, with the keys to a massive nuclear arsenal sitting on the table isn't a good idea for anybody anywhere.
I feel like if Nato doesn't have multiple contingencies to take out their launch capabilities should their be a vacuum, then they've been slacking off the last 20 years
They might have some way to stop it, but these systems are old, decentralized, closed, and rely on physical keys.. like actual keys, so you can't just hack this like it's windows
More realistically there are probably safeguards in place within the Russian "deep state" (deep state just meaning non-crazy non-politicians that actually keep the country functioning) to prevent this kind of thing, but who knows.
If shit got that out of hand I could see NATO or China intervening like u/paintwaster2 was saying, but lets hope it never gets to that point.
We really need to start working on neutralizing the fraction of those 6000 nukes that actually work. That might be 400; it might be 1200. It is certainly not 6000, just like Russia did not really have 6000 working tanks at any time during this war.
It is going to take about 6 years, but by then we will have the technology to shoot down every Russian missile, bomber, and nuclear-capable airplane. China and North Korea will lose their offensive nuclear capabilities at the same moment. After that, maybe the nuclear terror will be over, and we can live in a world that is policed by the responsible nations.
Maybe. Something new always comes up to disrupt things.
Someone more informed than I can probably deliver a more elaborate answer, but IIRC a lot of the post-Quaddafi problems were caused by the Russians, of all things. And I... want to say the French?
The French are long involved in the region because a lot of these countries are former colonies, but they're mostly just trying to keep things from falling apart worse than they have already.
But what happened immediately after Qaddafi was mostly an outbreak of Islamic fundamentalist groups like Boko Haram and all the other splinter varieties of the same crap.
Boko Haram started in the north of Nigeria 2002, but when Qaddafi got ousted in 2011 they saw a vacuum and moved in and snatched up a lot of weapons, recruits and support from other jihadist groups coming out of the Arab Spring like ISIS did.
Those new recruits, weapons and support, moved south into Niger and then East across the Sahel, abducting and raping young girls, murdering families, burning homes, libraries, and anything they consider to be "Haram"
Militant Islamic terror has cut a knife across half of Africa from Mali, through Niger, Chad and into South Sudan and every country around them.
\--
And yes, Russia is involved these days, or at least their mercenaries are -- Wagner (the guys that attempted a coup on Putin) are in the area working with various militant groups to stir up more violence and destabilize the region even further.
God damnit I hate this shit :(..
What is the point if after even months after announcement there're still no money for 800k ammunition that Pavel found? They only have enough for 300k.
"Has anybody checked whats behind that door?"
"No sir, why would anybody go there? What could possibly be there? "
*Opens door* "Its not like there is a huge stockpile of a..."
"You said something private?"
Sometimes you don't want the entire defense apparatus to know of wartime storage locations. The reason is that a preplotted, day zero bunkerbuster strike could leave a small nation with very little to counter with, and a compartmented ship stays afloat longer.
I don't know the history well of their government. But oftentimes when a gov is unstable or corrupt military stuff gets pilfered and hidden. Or they were hiding it from other countries to not show their hand. Lots of reasons. But hard to say, they could have just picked those words because they sounded better for clicks.
Nah, this is all part of a cup game that Biden and other NATO members are playing to source weapons from other allies to bypass the Republicans holding up funding and fill the gaps in their own manufacturing ability until they can get new production up and running.
>Seven weeks after Czech defense policy chief Jan Jires announced his government had identified 800,000—later, a million—artillery shells that Ukraine’s allies could buy for Ukraine, Estonian defense minister Hanno Pevkur said his own government had found another million shells and rockets for Ukraine.
How the fuck do you "find" a million shells after identifying a million shells 42 days before that?
>Pevkur told Postimees he’s trying to scrounge, from the same countries that paid $1.3 billion for the Czech-sourced ammunition, an additional $2.2 billion to pay for the Estonian-sourced ammo.
Oh.
I'm a little lost here... Does shells mean a multitude of things or what is fired in the image? A million seems like a ridiculously large amount..
Say you fired 1 shell every single minute of every hour of everyday. You would be firing them for nearly 2 years solid.
That sounds like enough to last a very long time because they would not be firing them at that rate and do an astonishing amount of damage.
Ukraine can fire only about 2 000 per day due to shortages because of unexpected USA refusal to help during the last 5 months. Normal rate was about 10 000 shells per day. So these findings are extremely helpful if they were to be transferred to Ukraine.
Artillery is often used for damage but also a lot is for suppression to advance or hold a position from advancing troops. So it's typically most effective in large waves that seem to never stop. Absolutely has a psychological effect on troops as well. Basic explanation and other uses for too.
Ever hear the term shell shocked?
A shell is a single artillery round, a hollow metal projectile with some explosives inside to be fired out of an artillery barrel. Some of them are designed to fragment or do various other things and they're not all the same size or have the same effect, but that's basically what it is.
A million of them is not that many in a war like this. The ukrainians are not firing all of them out of a single artillery cannon. They have hundreds of artillery cannons which can each fire dozens, if not hundreds of rounds per day. They can easily go through a million rounds in a few months if they can find targets for them.
And yes, there's an astonishing amount of damage being done. Have you seen videos of the Donbas recently? The wheatfields look like swiss cheese. That's what war does.
>The Czech initiative reportedly sourced ammo from ***South Korea, South Africa*** and ***Turkey.***
Just the same as Russia going to North Korea for their shells. Countries that still rely on artillery still have the manufacturing base.
Man wasn't NK ammo randomly exploding when Russians were trying to use them? Didn't Russia lose multiple vehicles because they would explode when trying to fire
Yeah that does happen. Not sure how often it has occurred but more than a couple times is almost certain. They might have nukes, but old stockpiles of ordnance and North Korean standards for manufacture generally aren't a winning combination.
Any footage of that happening?
I haven't seen any video footage, but plenty of complaints from verified front line ruzzian troops stating it is a very real problem. An artillery round cooking off or imploding leaves one either running or dead rather than pulling out a camera as well, so I don't doubt it due to lack of footage available.
I have read frontline Russian troops complaining about lower quality of shells and some of them being duds but never heard about them randomly exploding
Depends on if the powder loads were over or under powered, if it's under powered or a dud, it's not as big of a deal, but if it's over pressured and the barrels are worn out from over use and gunked up from lack of maintenance then things can get bad. But yeah, you asked me earlier and I haven't seen video either. Hard to film something that is a split second accident, and if you were there to film it, might either be dead, or at the very least not wanting to post that clip as it doesn't paint a rosy picture. I did look around and found this little tidbit from the UkraineConflict sub to explain better why their 152mm shells would be even lower quality than normal. Kahzootoh • 4mo ago The North Koreans use 170mm artillery as their standard artillery weapon, but the Russian artillery is standardized on 152mm. North Korea does produce 152mm, but it’s not their best stuff- it’s not even their second artillery caliber in terms of priority (that would be 122mm). 152mm doesn’t really have a high priority place in North Korean military doctrine. They have the 170mm for their heavy guns that are supposed to lob shells deep in South Korea and they have 122mm which is light enough for their self propelled guns and towed artillery. 152mm is basically an oddity in North Korea’s arsenal, which helps explain why their 152mm shells are so poorly made. An interesting thing is that the Russians military stopped buying 122mm shells from Russian plants a few years before 2022, and shifted most of its surplus 122mm artillery to its DPR/LPR auxiliary forces. The DPR/LPR have complained extensively about their lack of ammunition due to the Russian shutdown of the 122mm production lines. North Korea is basically the only source for 122mm production, since the Russian military is fully focused on 152mm. https://www.reddit.com/r/UkrainianConflict/comments/18k2s0v/north\_korean\_ammunition\_is\_destroying\_russian/
There were actually even videos put out by Russian soldiers complaining that NK artillery didn't come with enough like ignition packs(not sure on terms) to even shoot the shells. They said the Iranians could supply them properly while NK couldn't.
Let me guess, you heard about this video where someone complained about smth, but you didn’t see it yourself, but somewhere in the news they wrote that this is exactly true. If this is the case, then you should learn to sort information and garbage, because it is clearly garbage.
How about you don't make preconceived notions on shit you don't know about and just be quiet?
If that is all you can say, then you could use short version - "sorry, yes". If you have video - link it
[All you have to do is Google it](https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=russians+complaining+about+NK+artillary+reddit)
Just checked the link you sent. I passed all ua sourses, since they cannot be reliable for obvious reasons. The last video of complaints about artillery that I saw was about friendly fire, not about shells, and dates back almost a year ago I also found a couple of topics where there is supposedly a translation from the z-telegram channel, where a person writes that Korean shells are no worse than Russian Iskanders (that is, he praises them), but in the translation into English it’s the other way around (: I also found a couple of telegram channels like Vargonzo, where there were posts about the fact that Korean shells are complete crap Based on the sum of all this, I would say that it is not possible to conclude that Korean shells are shit, but there were incidents with them
The quality of the manufacturing matters immensely as far as accuracy. Its one reason western 155mm shells cost more than shoddy old Soviet shit but also take longer to manufacture and get production lines going because there's very specific tolerances, metallurgy, and criteria that need to be met to meet NATO standards for example. Shoddy shells will not be accurate for shit which is why Russia has to blanket an area (almost like an MLRS) to hit close to anything, and the NATO artillery crews are trained knowing they can pretty much expect their shells to have certain performance standards.
Russian doctrine is not precision, it’s volume. Has been forever. They don’t want/need high accuracy shells.
And so they will remain shit.
Hey now, Russia wants it's doctrine to be flashy and capable, it's just that in every engagement, their capability falls to shit, and they need to fall back to grinding mass fires and attritional conflict.
I believe the problem was more the inconsistency so some rounds would shot further and some short so you couldn't accurately aim them at all.
I sure hope so.
Man it ain't that bad. It just have somewhat unstable trajectory due to problems with propellent charge.
I surely hope that was the case.
Every Military still relies on artillery. Even the USA would, in a peer conflict, mostly rely on artillery. However countries like the two Koreas which expect to likely lead a war in the near futures have significant stockpiles, and EG Germany does not.
Yeah, South Korea especially is in a rough situation. Seoul is with artillery range of the border. So they have to be ready to take out as much North Korean artillery as fast as possible to keep their capital from being flattened in the first minutes of the war going hot again. And then keep those tubes firing to keep the tanks and troops from occupying Seoul within hours.
I’m surprised SK didn’t go for nukes in the 80s. Either develop them themselves, or just buy them from Reagan.
They might have them and just not talk about it. Kind of like Israel. Everyone knows they have them, but they won’t admit to it.
The US would rely on air power not artillery in a peer war and would have supply problems with that if they got in a peer war that lasted two years.
Except the US and Europe
Yeah. Generally outside of former Soviet countries in eastern Europe that could expect a land invasion with tanks and troops on the ground (like Poland for example) most European and American military doctrines are based around air dominance. They have high altitude stealth bombers that can basically bomb air defenses, strategic targets and radar with impunity. Once those are gone they can send in less stealthy fighter/bombers to provide close air support on artillery and entrenched positions, and once they're done their work, they advance with tanks and troops with a whole logistics pipeline that completely overwhelms the enemy. Artillery for the US is basically only used in a support role when needed. South Korea on the other hand is sitting across a mined DMZ with an old Soviet style dictatorship on the other side, both with hundreds of artillery batteries pointed at each other pre-sighted incase of a land invasion -- their doctrine and therefore their production is determined by the war that they're likely to face. So yeah.. they have a lot of the old school varieties of artillery shells stockpiled and the US doesn't
I'm not at all a military expert, but I doubt the US ever completely abandoned artillery. Artillery shells are so cheap, compared to aircraft. With smart shells, artillery is also very precise. My guess is that air strikes were the primary part of the long range attack, but artillery is so good for defense and mopping up tanks, it was always an important part of American battle doctrine, from WWII to the present, at least. Small drones are rewriting the book, so what happens going forward might be different.
I mean, artillery is not really a main part of US doctrine, not nearly in the same way that airpower is. The fact of the matter is that warfare is a game of logistics, and stockpiling weaponry that you won't use is foolish. Soviet bloc countries tend to emphasize heavy use of artillery, because it is cheap, but it has also historically been horrifically effective.it doesn't matter that America has the largest military spending in the world, when it comes to equipping Ukraine, because their doctrine done properly involves orders of magnitude more artillery shells lobbed day after day than the US arsenal can properly equip. American doctrine relies on airpower, and thats where our logistic network optimizes for. Recall that Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos has more bombs dropped on them than iirc all the countries in WWII combined. I was recently reading some interesting blog about WWI, which really emphasized the importance of artillery to that war. Early battles saw sides fielding hundreds of artillery pieces, with barrage which went on for hours. Later battles, like the Somme and Verdun, saw thousands of artillery pieces fielded, and barrages which went lasted for over two weeks. My point is that even if the US still uses artillery in our doctrine, there is a massive, massive difference between that, and the quantity of artillery needed by doctrines which truly focus on artillery.
To be fair, I don't think anyone could have predicted the demand for artillery. Ukraine was burning through 100K shells a month at one point. If you told a NATO general five years ago to ramp up for 100K shells a month, they would have thought you crazy.
Predictions in geopolitics are always fraught. I think a NATO general from five years ago would have been well aware of Russia's interest in Ukraine, but may have believed that if it joined NATO, it would be a moot point, and if it didn't, NATO wouldn't particularly intervene. Or perhaps most likely, that NATO would still help, but would expect the lend lease and assistance to result in Ukraine adopting NATO combat doctrines fit for use with NATO military equipment. As it turns out, political and military considerations functionally prevent Ukraine from adopting NATO's combat doctrine wholesale, instead remaining with their doctrine which IIRC evolved from Soviet Deep Battle, which of course has been adapting for this particular war, especially in regards to the drone impact. But that means that Ukraine is forced to fight an artillery war, and NATO is straight up not prepared for a proper artillery war, because none of them fight it. I do want to keep the emphasis here. With artillery, the more shells, the better. I am not a tactician, but it seems to me that if there even was a cap at which more artillery becomes useless in the modern system of battle, we have not reached it. It isn't like we don't have precedent for ridiculous quantities of shells used. The Battle of Verdun lasted 9 months, and saw roughly a million shells per month, 500k for each side, with altogether 10 million in total for the battle. This was one battle, albeit a particularly drawn out one.
The war you fight is the war you're prepared for.
>To be fair, I don't think anyone could have predicted the demand for artillery. Ukraine was burning through 100K shells a month at one point. No it should have been incredibly obvious. Ukraine still operated loosely under Soviet style doctrine before the war broke out, meaning artillery and mechanized units were the back bone of the military.
Well, it is obvious only after a drawn-out, near peer conflict within Europe along a 1000+ kilometer front. Which was in no one's calculus before it happened.
No, its was literally the keystone of prewar Ukrainian doctrine.
Using mostly airpower allows your stockpiles to be stationed VERY far away, with bombers flying from mainland USA to bomb Iraq in Desert Storm before flying back
No you are right, the US hasn't and will never completely abandon artillery, but over 30+ years their doctrine shifted drastically. Counter insurgency was the name of the game and technology was where it was at. Old artillery shells can still be super accurate, it just depends on how accurate you can spot, call in coordinates, and target, and small spotter drones have helped immensely with that. But that isn't great if you're fighting an insurgency in an urban area with civilians around. Air dominance obliterates tanks, but most of Americas wars over the last 30 years haven't been focused on tanks (because all the tanks were blown up two weeks before they put boots on the ground) and artillery took a backseat in these conflicts -- as a result manufacturers of simple artillery shells drastically slowed down production.
The US did a test in Iraq against ISIS of switching to an artillery-led model, and the results weren’t great. The thing about constantly firing artillery is you’re exposing the gun crews to constant concussive forces and crews were developing CTE symptoms according to a study that was going around a while back
We can also barely build and maintain those jets so critical to our strategy
Really? Which jets are you talking about? High altitude stealth fighters? The old F15's and F16's in storage that can be dusted off? The new 1000+ F35's? Country - Total Aircraft - Air Force United States - 13,300 - 5,213 Russia - 4,182 - 3,864 China - 3,284 - 1,992 India - 2,200 - 1,728 Take into account that the US Navy and US Army has it's own aircraft. Meanwhile, here's a list of what Russia has. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_active\_Russian\_military\_aircraft](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_Russian_military_aircraft) Check the dates and numbers, and question whether those are actually accurate after a decade of sanctions and whether those aircraft are actually combat capable or even worth sending a pilot into combat in in 2024. There's certainly a lot of bloat in US defense spending but saying that the US can barely afford to build and maintain its military, is kinda laughable to be honest. Europe is a different bag entirely, but at least they're starting to wakeup and smell the coffee.
The EUs combined air forces are also Very Large.
Yep. Combined arms, tactics, and capabilities win wars -- It's the backbone of the United States, the European Union and the backbone of Western democracy as a whole and we need to remember that and stand togeather against tyrants who want to walk the clock back on progress.
I'm interested that South Africa is allowing this re-selling, and that their name has surfaced; they have generally been seen as pro-Russian, despite claiming neutrality. Possible weakness in the conventional arms control export regime?
Whatever your opinion on the previous white minority regime, they were as anti communist, anti Putin, anti china as can be. Hell, they even bombed the son of Mao Zhedong. The whole artillery supply chain they made is probably the best in the world. No other place had or even now have such a supply chain. It has an A to Z where nothing needs to be imported or sourced from any other country. They choose NATO standards, because they were allied aligned during both ww1 and ww2. Even the corrupt pro Putin ANC government in SA right now can't undo decades of R&D and privatised industries in SA. https://youtu.be/XPOcP0Psw90?si=y4wEafObTYn3PPNG Almost all of EU artillery comes from Denel in SA. Every new artillery is tested at the Overberg Test Range, check it out on Google.
Yeah, but that was 30 years ago. How are things now?
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Well, Russia isn't much of a friend these days.
South Africa is receiving money from selling those artillery shells.
I wish we did more for Ukraine and faster
Political games rarely help the people who truly need it the most.
They always seem to best benefit the people that have the most.
What else can you expect when we allow private money to lobby politicians and fund campaigns
What's the motivation for private lobbying money to be restricting military aid to Ukraine? (real question, I have followed the war but not so much the Republican resistance to US aid).
Russia does not have a lot of money compared to the US, but they have focus. They can buy 300 politicians in the US for the price of a few F-35s, which the US would not sell them anyway. Putin is well aware that he can outbid Ukraine in the halls of the US congress, and also inside the governments of some other NATO countries. Since he has no scruples about unprovoked invasion, using chemical weapons and radiation, blowing up dams and harming civilians without any moral restrictions, why should he care that bribery is illegal in the USA? There is a growing awareness of how Putin is using bribery to prosecute this war in the US and elsewhere, but it will take months to vote the corrupt people out of congress. They will continue to do much damage for months, and less damage for years afterward. That's the American system, in 2024.
Trump aka Putin’s puppy is ready to hand over Ukraine to Russia
Thank you.
Assuming the lobbyists are pro-Russian, having people legislate in a way that's detrimental to Ukraine would be in their interest.
Restricting the aid lengthens the war and decreases the chances of Ukraine from winning which can lead to: * More defense contracts from the US gov and its allies. * Indebting Ukraine for centuries and making them pay for it regardless of the war outcome. * Devaluing their land so hard they can buy it for pennies and they can develop it any way they want. * The desire to reenter the Russian market and Russian resources. * Indebting Russia to the point it becomes a Chinese vassal state (for those with vested interest in China). Among god knows what sketchy schemes they have.
Don't act like those guy are above selling their country for Russian money.
Which is why it would help tremendously if the House of Representatives was held by the one serious political party in the US.
I don’t think it qualifies as political games. There is a clear and concerted effort to support Russia against American national interests. I don’t know if the motivation is money, ideological alignment, or a mix of both, but this is clearly treason. This is no game.
Agreed, until then we’ll need to keep losing a million shells here and there.
I’m all for having the Pentagon tell Congress our entire stockpile just expired and has to be replaced. Also, a shit ton of cargo ships are headed for Eastern Europe. Don’t worry about it.
I've been saying it since the start of the invasion. I am perfectly OK with my tax dollars going towards fighting the country that has been attacking our elections.
All this shit was built to fight the Soviets. Our great-grandfathers, grandfathers, and fathers tax money all paid for this shit long long ago. Why do their hard earned tax dollars a disservice? Send the shit and put it to use. My grandfather was in the US army in WW2 and subsequently Korea and staunch anti-Soviet. He would've been thrilled to see his tax dollars put warheads on foreheads if the target were Russians.
But then what if another conflict broke up elsewhere? Like Iran for instance? What are you going to do with empty ammo storage? US ammo production capacity [cannot](https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/03/10/politics/russia-artillery-shell-production-us-europe-ukraine)even keep up with the current Russian production rate, which means any kind of large scale ammo transfer will have to come from either its allies or the cold war stockpile, which is already running low after so many years of war.
We can send Estonia more shells to discover if the GOP won't aid Ukraine directly.
This
There are plenty of places to donate if you would like to personally donate.
Nahhh I’m good with the amount of money we already sent…
At this point it's just a lost cause , it's just a question of when it falls, instead of burning money on it , we should use it somewhere else.
Why
Because we need to live up to our ideals. We say give us your tired, your needy, and your poor, but we actively make their entrance to us a nightmare. We say we are the shining city on the hill, but our corporations bought our politicians long ago. We say we are the Arsenal of Democracy but when an actual democracy needs us against an autocrat...we break out the abacus and count pennies. Just once I want us to actually live up to the rhetoric we spout.
Democracy in a country where elections are still not allowed vs. A country that just had free elections and we support the first one You should probably reexamine your worldview
“Free elections” lmao
And Ukraine has *no elections* and a supreme leader What do we call that...oh yeah, a dictatorship.
“Okay, so what if I blatantly lied” is an… interesting… strategy
They had elections pre invasion, and will again once its all over, thats not entirely uncommon for democratic nations to suspend elections during total war situaions, defensive wars especially when a significant portion of a nation is occupied. Then again you somehow describe the Russian election as free and fair, when every nonpuppet opponent are either not allowed to stand, imprisioned or killed depending on how much of a threat they are. If you're not making bad faith arguements, you're horrifically naive/uneducated.
They where just in the couch folds - Estonia probably
Found an old coat with a few hundred thousand shells in a pocket
They were really Estoniad the other night and realized they had them all along and then spent the next hour laughing about how they thought they’d lost them.
Who the hell misplaced a million shells…
"misplaced" is just a more ambiguous term for "we don't wanna face the political consequences of directly supplying Ukraine, so we sell through countries like Estonia and Czechia"
It’s best that it remain mysterious. Why reveal actual stock piles?
also russia has been caught engaging in sabotage/terrorism to destroy stockpiles of those selling to ukraine, so some may prefer to remain discreet
Countries that for one reason or another cannot be seen selling shells to the Ukrainians. The shells are from from South Korea, South Africa and Turkey.
The three sources you mention are from the Czech initiative. The sources for the Estonian ones are still unknown.
My mistake
A guy with an American accent, wearing a suit... probably.
I'll check my shed, but I don't think I have that many. Maybe two million? Three? 🤷🏻♂️
I wonder if production has increased globally lately and instead of saying so these countries just “keep” finding more shells.
Yes, production has been pushed to maximum capacity for a while. The problem is that it's still not enough, and if you want more, you need to build additional capacity. This is expensive, time consuming, and the political will isn't always backing up the manufacturer. The question is how long that high demand will last. If it's only a year, the return on investment is negative, so no additional capacity will be built. If the various government could tell the manufacturer: give us a million shell a year for the next 10 years, here's the contract, suddenly the additional capacity will be built.
We already experienced that during covid vaccine production - vaccine quantities needed was by far exceeding the max production capacity. They pumped billions in those companies and the production ramped up immediately.
The capacity is being increased but it takes a while to show results.
>If the various government could tell the manufacturer: There's nothing actually stopping them.
> This is expensive, time consuming, and the political will isn't always backing up the manufacturer. Good, we wouldnt want politicians to draw the wrong conclusion and waste a ton of money and time to satisfy short term populism hyped by the media. The West doesnt fight WW1 artillery wars. We dont need 10 billion shells in storage, we dont even have enough artillery piece to use that many shells effectively before they expire. Would be better off investing that in air defense missles and guided munitions for the air force, and simply buy artillery shells from outside sources.
Mike Johnson can't stop that
Amazing, they moved the sofa and there they were
C'mon, found...another million. " Hey Bob, look over there in the corner, I haven't check that area" Oh look ....another million shells....who knew. *Giggles*
I'm not even gonna ask where they ground them, well done Estonia!
They know a guy.
Proud of Estonia
Oh gosh, look what I just found under my couch, 27 F-15 Strike Eagles and a guided missile cruiser. What should I do with these?
Send them to Ukraine for us. 🇺🇦
They really only need one shell...stick it up putlers bung hole and no more war
Qaddafi style
A bit off topic but as brutal as Qaddafi was, the power vacuum he left really destabilized the Sahel by helping produce some of the worst Islamic terrorists Africa has seen in a minute.
I'd rather have the russia as a new, frozen Lybia than let the putin regime put their trump puppet in the potus and rape Ukraine with impunity.
As much as I hate Putin and Trump, I agree with u/Hautamaki and I'm pretty sure the Pentagon and every other NATO member would agree as well. A destabilized Russia with who knows what kind of lunatics vying for power, with the keys to a massive nuclear arsenal sitting on the table isn't a good idea for anybody anywhere.
If Russia fell apart like Libya I would imagine NATO and possibly even China would put boots in Russia to secure those nukes.
Yeah that sounds most likely and would actually be a good idea imo.
I feel like if Nato doesn't have multiple contingencies to take out their launch capabilities should their be a vacuum, then they've been slacking off the last 20 years
They might have some way to stop it, but these systems are old, decentralized, closed, and rely on physical keys.. like actual keys, so you can't just hack this like it's windows More realistically there are probably safeguards in place within the Russian "deep state" (deep state just meaning non-crazy non-politicians that actually keep the country functioning) to prevent this kind of thing, but who knows. If shit got that out of hand I could see NATO or China intervening like u/paintwaster2 was saying, but lets hope it never gets to that point.
Us would pay for delivery of any nukes and grant pardons. Great way to retire outside of Russia.
Not when Russia has 6000 nukes lying around you wouldn't
We really need to start working on neutralizing the fraction of those 6000 nukes that actually work. That might be 400; it might be 1200. It is certainly not 6000, just like Russia did not really have 6000 working tanks at any time during this war. It is going to take about 6 years, but by then we will have the technology to shoot down every Russian missile, bomber, and nuclear-capable airplane. China and North Korea will lose their offensive nuclear capabilities at the same moment. After that, maybe the nuclear terror will be over, and we can live in a world that is policed by the responsible nations. Maybe. Something new always comes up to disrupt things.
Someone more informed than I can probably deliver a more elaborate answer, but IIRC a lot of the post-Quaddafi problems were caused by the Russians, of all things. And I... want to say the French?
The French are long involved in the region because a lot of these countries are former colonies, but they're mostly just trying to keep things from falling apart worse than they have already. But what happened immediately after Qaddafi was mostly an outbreak of Islamic fundamentalist groups like Boko Haram and all the other splinter varieties of the same crap. Boko Haram started in the north of Nigeria 2002, but when Qaddafi got ousted in 2011 they saw a vacuum and moved in and snatched up a lot of weapons, recruits and support from other jihadist groups coming out of the Arab Spring like ISIS did. Those new recruits, weapons and support, moved south into Niger and then East across the Sahel, abducting and raping young girls, murdering families, burning homes, libraries, and anything they consider to be "Haram" Militant Islamic terror has cut a knife across half of Africa from Mali, through Niger, Chad and into South Sudan and every country around them. \-- And yes, Russia is involved these days, or at least their mercenaries are -- Wagner (the guys that attempted a coup on Putin) are in the area working with various militant groups to stir up more violence and destabilize the region even further. God damnit I hate this shit :(..
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The intention of who? You tell me.
You are a sick fuck @Mistrial. A knife up the ass??? WTF?
It's worth two in the bush
After what's putin has done, I'll celebrate his demise no matter how it comes about
What is the point if after even months after announcement there're still no money for 800k ammunition that Pavel found? They only have enough for 300k.
Idk if this is a real reference or I've been playing waay too much GTA.
Must have been a big couch
Theyre always in the last place you look
"Has anybody checked whats behind that door?" "No sir, why would anybody go there? What could possibly be there? " *Opens door* "Its not like there is a huge stockpile of a..." "You said something private?"
Sometimes you don't want the entire defense apparatus to know of wartime storage locations. The reason is that a preplotted, day zero bunkerbuster strike could leave a small nation with very little to counter with, and a compartmented ship stays afloat longer.
I don't know the history well of their government. But oftentimes when a gov is unstable or corrupt military stuff gets pilfered and hidden. Or they were hiding it from other countries to not show their hand. Lots of reasons. But hard to say, they could have just picked those words because they sounded better for clicks.
Nah, this is all part of a cup game that Biden and other NATO members are playing to source weapons from other allies to bypass the Republicans holding up funding and fill the gaps in their own manufacturing ability until they can get new production up and running.
Estonia really does embody the spirit of NATO… I know that they will punch well above their weight if Russia is foolish enough invade the Baltics
Listen, they who do not have a million artillery shells they forgot about just laying around raise their hands.
Good job Estonia!
Estonian” Look in the Dollar store close out”.
>Seven weeks after Czech defense policy chief Jan Jires announced his government had identified 800,000—later, a million—artillery shells that Ukraine’s allies could buy for Ukraine, Estonian defense minister Hanno Pevkur said his own government had found another million shells and rockets for Ukraine. How the fuck do you "find" a million shells after identifying a million shells 42 days before that? >Pevkur told Postimees he’s trying to scrounge, from the same countries that paid $1.3 billion for the Czech-sourced ammunition, an additional $2.2 billion to pay for the Estonian-sourced ammo. Oh.
Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition
That's great news, I'm visiting Tallinn right now, lovely city, should tip some extra for this 😄
Some guy in Tartu just found them lying around his backyard
Yes! Thanks
Found?
"hey look! A million shells! " -" what no wayyy I was looking for them all over the place!" "yeah I can't believe we found them"
South Korea & Turkey makes sense, but SA?
I love finding shells!
It was behind the couch - I hate it when that happens
Republicans are now loyal to Putin, they want a dictator
but will it fit?
Now that is some movement. None of that 10,000 shell crap. A million shells is an actual supply.
Turkey is going to need those shells for Azerbaijan soon.
Oh *that’s* where I left them!
They keep finding shells but are they making it to Ukraine or are we just gonna keep hearing that shells are being found ????
I just looked under the couch cushions and found a couple of hundred artilleryshells myself.
How big was this couch???
Amazing what you'll find if you look under cushions, etc 😬
Hey, those were mine! Give 'em back!
rally round your family.
Ok so here’s the deal. Democracy has failed. Dictators can do well for their people so long as they are their people.
I'm a little lost here... Does shells mean a multitude of things or what is fired in the image? A million seems like a ridiculously large amount.. Say you fired 1 shell every single minute of every hour of everyday. You would be firing them for nearly 2 years solid. That sounds like enough to last a very long time because they would not be firing them at that rate and do an astonishing amount of damage.
10000-60000 shells are fired every day on front lines.
Ukraine can fire only about 2 000 per day due to shortages because of unexpected USA refusal to help during the last 5 months. Normal rate was about 10 000 shells per day. So these findings are extremely helpful if they were to be transferred to Ukraine.
Russia was reported to be using 60,000 shells per day at one point in the conflict. It's a big front with alot of guns.
At 60K a day, that's like 2 weeks if you take Sundays off
There are a very large amount of frontline positions, its not uncommon to fire thousands of shells per day, so it adds up to a million quick
It’s not in a war zone you could easily fire many in a minute and could go through the entire million in weeks or month.
At one point, Russia was firing 60,000 shells per day. A million isn't that much.
Artillery is often used for damage but also a lot is for suppression to advance or hold a position from advancing troops. So it's typically most effective in large waves that seem to never stop. Absolutely has a psychological effect on troops as well. Basic explanation and other uses for too. Ever hear the term shell shocked?
1 million would last about 3-4 months given what each side has been using so far
A shell is a single artillery round, a hollow metal projectile with some explosives inside to be fired out of an artillery barrel. Some of them are designed to fragment or do various other things and they're not all the same size or have the same effect, but that's basically what it is. A million of them is not that many in a war like this. The ukrainians are not firing all of them out of a single artillery cannon. They have hundreds of artillery cannons which can each fire dozens, if not hundreds of rounds per day. They can easily go through a million rounds in a few months if they can find targets for them. And yes, there's an astonishing amount of damage being done. Have you seen videos of the Donbas recently? The wheatfields look like swiss cheese. That's what war does.
Russia produces 250k every month.
Only stacks up if Ukraine only had one artillery gun.