Ukrainian Gunners Are Searching Down Russia’s Siege Mortars

The Russian military widened its conflict on Ukraine with round 50 self-propelled 2S4 Tulpans: hulking, 30-ton tracked automobiles hauling 240-millimeter mortars that lob 290-pound shells a distance of six miles. “Tulpan” is Russian for “tulip.”

Nineteen months later, Ukrainian drone operators have noticed, and Ukrainian artillery batteries have destroyed, no fewer than 18 of the nine-person 2S4s—round a 3rd of the pre-war pressure.

Not less than one knowledgeable theorized the Ukrainians had been making a particular effort to knock out 2S4s. “They’re doubtless a precedence for Ukrainian counterbattery hearth,” tweeted Rob Lee, an analyst with the Overseas Coverage Analysis Institute in Pennsylvania.

It’s not onerous to know why. The 2S4 is uniquely damaging: a city-destroying siege weapon. Even when it misses, a 2S4 can put on down enemy troops. When the Syrian military deployed Soviet-made 240-millimeter mortars in opposition to the Israeli military in 1973, “many courageous males succumb[ed] to psychological fatigue beneath the relentless bombardment,” Israeli veteran Alon Harksberg wrote.

The Soviet military deployed 240-millimeter siege mortars throughout World Warfare II. The 2S4 is a cell model of the M-240 mortar the Soviets developed within the Nineteen Fifties as a substitute for the war-vintage weapons.

The Soviet military had a whole lot of 2S4s however put most of them in storage following the USSR’s collapse. The Russian military deployed simply 4 2S4s in the course of the first Chechen marketing campaign in 1994 and 10 2S4s in the course of the second marketing campaign in Chechnya in 1996.

Throughout the ‘96 marketing campaign, the large mortars took goal at insurgent forces in Grozny—and proceeded to flatten the town, in keeping with Marek Depczynski, a professor at Warfare Research College in Warsaw. “In January and February 2000, in Chechnya, the 2S4 units consumed about 1,510 missiles, together with 1,410 high-explosive, 40 [anti-personnel] cassette and 60 guided 1K113 Smelczak ones,” Depczynski wrote.

“Thus one can threat an evaluation that many of the buildings in Grozny might [have been] destroyed by Tulpans,” Depczynski added. A 2S4 shell that struck a five-floor constructing would plummet all the best way to the second flooring earlier than exploding. “The demolition of a constructing of this measurement required two shells of the 2S4.”

Apparently determined to forestall the demolition of their very own cities, the Ukrainians have been looking 2S4s. In a single dramatic strike in Could 2022, Ukrainian gunners scrutinized a Russian T.V. report on a front-line 2S4 crew, geolocated the mortar’s place in Luhansk Oblast in jap Ukraine and blew it up with a precision artillery barrage.

That was the Russian military’s first 2S4 loss in Ukraine. Over the following 16 months, Kyiv’s batteries destroyed one other 17 Tulips, the latest on or earlier than Monday. “Troopers of the forty fifth Artillery Brigade recognize that which is gorgeous,” the Ukrainian protection ministry tweeted together with a video of the 2S4 exploding. “This is a bouquet from them to you.”

The Ukrainian military has made “2S4 mortar crew” a harmful job description. However the marketing campaign in opposition to Russian tulips is way from over. Whereas the Russians went to conflict with simply 50 or so 2S4s, they’ve not less than one other hundred of the enormous mortars in storage.