Just when you thought the equipment-starved Russian military couldn’t get more desperate for firepower, it goes and creates some new bizarre and unwieldy do-it-yourself weapon.
DIY vehicles and artillery that have appeared on the Russian side of the 700-mile front line of Russia’s 28-month wider war on Ukraine include: armored personnel carriers with rocket pods borrowed from helicopters; trucks packing naval anti-submarine rockets; “turtle tanks” with anti-drone shells made of sheet metal; and assault motorcycles encased in the same metal sheeting.
But the improvised field gun that debuted on Russian social media last week might be the strangest—and least effective—of these cobbled-together weapons. It’s a 2A28 low-pressure 73-millimeter gun that some enterprising Russian technicians popped off a 1960s-vintage BMP-1 fighting vehicle and welded to a crude carriage so it can be towed.
One video of a naked 2A28, which is normally seated in a tracked BMP-1’s armored turret, depicts a soldier squatting behind the gun, loading and firing it at a rate of a shell every few seconds. Another depicts a 2A28 trundling behind the truck towing it.
If you’re impressed, look more closely. The turretless 2A28 leaps several inches each time it shoots. That’s a problem.
To seat a 73-millimeter gun in a 15-ton BMP-1, the 2A28’s designers reduced the pressure inside the barrel, resulting in a lightweight weapon that has low recoil—but lacks accuracy beyond a few hundred yards. Fire the gun from the ground without the benefit of an armored hull to provide stability, and that accuracy is bound to be far, far worse.
All that is to say, a DIY 2A28 field gun might work against large, unmoving targets that are no more than a few hundred yards away. But do Russian troops really believe they’ll be able to tow a 73-millimeter low-pressure field gun across a drone-infested no-man’s-land in order to bring it into effective shooting range?
Fifty-ton Russian tanks struggle to survive Ukraine’s drone swarms. An unarmored field gun towed behind a truck is even more vulnerable.
It’s not hard to understand why the Russians are experimenting with unseated 2A28s, even though the DIY guns are bound to be inaccurate and vulnerable. The Russians went to war in Ukraine in February 2022 with around 4,000 howitzers and rocket launchers. They’ve lost at least 1,400 of these guns and launchers to Ukrainian action.
Yes, the Russians can build new artillery pieces and recover old Cold War pieces from long-term storage. No, they probably can’t generate replacement weapons fast enough to make good deepening losses. Unrelenting demand for battlefield firepower means front-line troops will continue improvising.
The alternative is doing nothing—and risk attacking Ukrainian positions with no fire support, instead of inaccurate and vulnerable fire support.
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