The 2S7 tracked howitzer is one of the biggest artillery pieces in Russia’s wider war on Ukraine. Both sides use them. And both sides prize them. Firing a 100-kg shell as far as 32 km, the 14-person 2S7s can avoid most retaliatory fire.
But that’s changing as Ukraine’s drones range deeper and deeper behind Russian lines. On or just before Thursday, a surveillance drone belonging to the Ukrainian army’s 15th Artillery Reconnaissance Brigade—perhaps one of the unit’s Shark drones—spotted a Russian 2S7 and its ammunition truck somewhere along the 700-mile front line.
“The adjacent units turned the self-propelled artillery system with a powerful 203-mm cannon into scrap metal with a well-aimed shot,” the brigade boasted.
It’s unclear which adjacent unit struck the 2S7, and with what, but it’s worth pointing out that the 15th Artillery Reconnaissance Brigade is equipped with BM-30 Smerch rocket launchers that lob 800-kg rockets as far as 120 km.
Sure, there are plenty of munitions that can range farther than the 2S7’s shells. It’s not for no reason that Ukraine has lost around half a dozen of its 100 pre-war 2S7s—and the Russians have written off around three dozen of their own stock of several hundred 2S7s.
But the 2S7s and their North Korean-made equivalents, the M1989s, tend to operate far enough from enemy positions to avoid the densest concentrations of surveillance and attack drones that represent the biggest threats to forces on both sides. “They are long-range—quite hard to destroy them,” Kriegsforscher, a Ukrainian drone operator, wrote about the North Korean artillery systems the Russians use in increasing numbers.
The Russian armed forces “received a huge amount of artillery from Korea,” Kriegsforscher observed. They may number in the hundreds. Finding and destroying them and other long-range Russian guns and launchers—including the 2S7s—is a top priority as Ukraine struggles to stabilize the front line.
Building the drone wall
More and better drones are the key. Lately, the Ukrainian armed forces have been acquiring at least 200,000 small drones every month—and deploying them to create what David Kirichenko, a fellow with the UK-based Henry Jackson Society, described as a “wall” of drones extending 15 km into Russian-occupied territory.
15 km isn’t deep enough, of course—not for 2S7s and M1989s that shoot more than twice as far. But efforts are underway to extend the drone wall to 40 km. “The goal: deny Russian forces the ability to move undetected across the front,” according to Kirichenko.
Drones that capture and repeat radio signals, thus increasing the range of the most distant first-person-view attack drones, are critical to this extension. As the control system falls into place, analyst Andrew Perpetua anticipated the Ukrainian drone wall will stretch even farther—eventually as far as 100 km.
“You have layers of drone superiority,” Perpetua projected.
Russia could counter with its own drones, of course. But Russian industry—cumbersome and often corrupt—struggles to scale and innovate at the same pace as Ukrainian industry. At the same time, Ukraine’s electronic warfare—that is, radio-jamming—is much more effective than Russia’s and often grounds Russia’s wireless drones while Ukraine’s own drones fly freely. To counter this, the Russians are scrambling to deploy more fiber-optic drones, which send and receive signals via thin wires instead of wirelessly over the radio spectrum.
If Ukrainian troops can preserve their drone edge, they could eventually rob Russian forces of any freedom of action.
“You push a critical number of drone pilots into each layer [of the drone wall], overwhelming Russian pilots and completely cutting off all logistics access,” Perpetua explained. “I mean, all artillery is cut off, all infantry cut off, out to 100 kilometers.”
That the 15th Artillery Reconnaissance Brigade could find and hit a Russian 2S7 potentially 32 km away is one small signal that the Ukrainian drone wall is slowly getting wider.
