2024-07-24 01:19:06
As far as the number of soldiers is concerned, the Kremlin logically has the upper hand compared to Ukraine. Moscow is no longer doing so well with the replacement of combat equipment that the soldiers of the occupied country manage to liquidate. In order to make up for the losses, the army often sends weapons and vehicles made from parts of already decommissioned machines to Ukraine. One of them attracted attention with its extraordinary uselessness.
It is still perhaps the strangest and least effective weapon that Moscow has ever sent into battle. | Video: Platform X / @WarArmor13
Among the equipment that Russia has sent to the front, in addition to previously decommissioned tanks, there are armored personnel carriers with missile modules borrowed from helicopters, trucks carrying anti-submarine missiles, “turtle tanks” covered in sheet metal to protect them from drone attacks, and similarly “modified” offensive motorcycles. Perhaps the biggest uproar in recent weeks, however, was caused by an improvised field cannon that appeared in videos on Russian social networks.
It is perhaps the strangest and least effective weapon the Kremlin-controlled military has sent into battle to date. The footage shows a Russian soldier crouching behind a disassembled 2A28 cannon, loading it and firing after a few seconds.
The cannon was a regular part of the armament of the Soviet BMP-1 infantry fighting vehicle, which Russia began mass-producing 60 years ago. Apparently, Russian army technicians dismantled it from an already retired armor and welded it to a light mobile sheet metal structure resembling a classic trailer, thus creating a makeshift mobile cannon.
A ridiculous inaccuracy
In order to fit the 73-millimeter cannon into the 15-ton BMP-1 tracked vehicle, the designers then reduced the pressure inside the barrel. Thanks to this, a light weapon with low recoil could be created, which can be relatively accurate at a distance of several hundred meters. However, without a solid foundation, there can be no talk of such accuracy, reports the Forbes server.
The armor not only protects the cannon itself, but thanks to its weight it allows the soldiers to aim more reliably. A casually constructed cannon jumps back a few centimeters with each shot without sufficient support, as the video at the beginning of the article shows. And this is a problem that fundamentally reduces the success of the intervention,
Thus, an improvised field weapon can work against large, immobile targets that are more or less in sight. However, it is hardly possible to get the weapon to an effective distance in places that are closely watched by dozens of drones from the sky.
It’s not hard to see why the Russians are experimenting with exposed 2A28 guns, even though they are likely to be inaccurate and vulnerable. When they launched the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, they had about four thousand howitzers and rocket launchers at their disposal. At least 1,400 of them have already been lost at the hands of Ukrainian fighters. They are probably not replacing them fast enough.
This is no ordinary drone. Experts were surprised by footage of the total destruction of a Russian tank (link to the article with the video here)
A small drone destroyed an armored Russian T-80 tank weighing tens of tons. | Video: Aktuálně.cz/X/NAFORaccoon