The ‘Old’ British Howitzer Ukrainians Call A Mercedes Next To Every Russian Gun At The Front D

January 2025, a Ukrainian battery commander with the call sign Azure stands in a treeine somewhere between Zapperia and Prosk. A Ukrainian journalist asks him about the British howitzer his brigade has just been issued. The commander does not reach for a spec sheet. He does not list ranges or shell weights.

He says one sentence that will travel further than any official British army press release ever did. Comparing it to Soviet weapons, he says, is like comparing a Ziguli to a Mercedes E-Class. The difference is not just noticeable. It is colossal in every category, in every criterion. The weapon he was talking about was 30 years old.

It had been quietly retired by its own army. It fired a barrel three calibers shorter than the modern NATO standard by any specification table. It should have been obsolete. And yet, by November 2025, the British Ministry of Defense confirmed something extraordinary. Every single AS90 in the British infantry, 99 vehicles in total, had been transferred to Ukraine.

The British army no longer operates this howitzer in any form. The entire fleet now serves on the Eastern front against Russia. This is the story of how a dated British self-propelled gun became one of the most quietly devastating Western artillery systems on the Ukrainian battlefield and why the Ukrainians who crew it refused to give it up.

The problem began in 1985. The British Army needed to replace its aging Abbott self-propelled gun and the American M109 it had supplemented it with the tree national SP70 project a joint British German and Italian howitzer program was collapsing under cost overruns and political deadlock. Vicar’s ship building and engineering limited based in Barrow infernus made a private gamble.

They would build their own 155 mm self-propelled howitzer on their own money betting that SP70 would die. It died. In 1989, Vicers won the British Army’s Abbott replacement competition against three rivals, including the American M109 Paladin. The contract was for 179 vehicles at £300 million. They called it the artillery system for the 1990s. AS90.

Deliveries ran from 1992 to 1995. Now, the technical reality, the AS90 weighs 45 tons combat loaded. It is powered by a Cumins VTA903 diesel producing 660 horsepower pushing it to 55 km/h on road with a 360 km operational range. It crews five commander, driver, gunner, and two loaders. Armor is 17 mm of welded steel. Proof against small arms and shell splinters, but nothing heavier.

The main gun is a 155 mm L31 Ordinance, 39 calibers long. Elevation runs from -5° to + 70°. Traverse is a full 360°. Ammunition stowage is 48 projectiles with 31 in a turret bustle magazine and 17 in the hull plus 33 charges. Maximum range with the standard L15 high explosive shell is 24.7 km with base extended range projectiles that climbs to roughly 30 km.

But the number that matters most on the modern battlefield is not range. It is rate of fire. According to British Army specifications, the AS90 can deliver three rounds in under 10 seconds in burst mode. Six rounds per minute for 3 minutes at intense rate. Two rounds per minute sustained for an hour. In trials, two AS90s firing in concert have placed 261 kg of high explosive on a single target in less than 10 seconds.

A 2008 to 2009 capability enhancement program added BAE systems Laps laser inertial pointing system, GPS automatic fuse setting and barrel bend measurement. The vehicle can come into action, fire 18 rounds, and displace position in under 5 minutes. In 2007, it was certified to fire the Rathon M982 Excalibur GPS guided round following trials at Yuma Proving Ground.

There was supposed to be more, much more. In 1993, Britain approved an upgrade called Braveheart, a 52 caliber barrel, 96 conversions contracted to BAE Systems in 2002. Promised range was 30 km unassisted, 40 km with extended range ammunition. The program died when the South African BI modular propellant charge failed both in sensitive munitions and intensive fire requirements.

That cancellation locked the British army into the L39 barrel. It meant the AS90 would forever fire roughly the same distance as Russia’s 1989 vintage 2S19M s and fall 15 km short of modern L-52 systems like the German PZH2000, the French Caesar, the Polish Crab, and Ukraine’s own Badana. By the 2020s, the British army was actively retiring the AS90.

The fleet had eroded from 179 to 134 by 2008 to roughly 89 by April 2016. Range was the killer. NATO peers had moved on. The final British live fire took place at exercise winter camp in Estonia in May 2024 conducted by 127 battery at Tappa. Now before we get into how this old British howitzer is performing in Ukraine, if you are enjoying this deep dive into British engineering, hit subscribe.

It takes a second, costs nothing, and helps the channel grow. All right, let’s get into the combat record. The first transfer was announced by Prime Minister Rishi Sunnak on January 14th, 2023. 30 AS90s pledged alongside 14 Challenger, two tanks. The first trunch delivered in 2023 totaled 32 vehicles, 20 battle ready and 12 stripped for spare parts.

A second tranch followed in April 2024. A third batch of roughly 16 came in July to September 2024 under the new Labor government with Defense Secretary John Healey confirming on September the 30, 2024 that 10 had arrived with six more imminent. Then came the disclosure. A November 2025 UK Ministry of Defense Freedom of Information release reported by James confirmed that the Ministry had donated to Ukraine all 99 AS90s declared in its 2021 United Nations Register of Conventional Arms return, every operable hull, every cannibalization donor, the entire declared fleet. Ukrainian crews trained at the Royal School of Artillery at Lark Hill on Ssbury plane in a compressed 3-week conversion course delivered primarily by 19 regiment Royal Artillery. According to the Defense Post, Lieutenant Colonel Ed Botil, chief instructor at the Royal School of Artillery, said of his Ukrainian

students that they had soaked up everything taught them, and within a couple of weeks they would be firing the AS90 in anger. He was right. First combat use was documented on June 15th, 2023 with footage circulated on the Ukrainian general staff linked Telegram channel Operativ ZSU. Confirmed Ukrainian operators across open source reporting include the third assault brigade, the 49th artillery brigade mistlaf the brave out of churn, the 58th motorized brigade, the 116th mechanized brigade firing on Kupansk, the 117th heavy mechanized brigade and the 151st mechanized brigade. Operations have been documented across the zepparia, kupansk, prosk and kursk axes. A Forbes relayed account picked up via Polish tech outlet WPEK describes one AS90 crew surviving at least six consecutive Russian strikes. Artillery, FPV drones, more

artillery and a Lancet loitering munition. The vehicle was severely damaged. It did not burn. It did not cook off. The crew walked away. Now the comparison Azure was making. The Russian D30, a 122mm towed howitzer designed in 1963, has a maximum range of 15.4 km. The 2S3 AATsia, a 152 mm self-propelled gun from 1971, manages 17.4 km.

The 2S19 MER S, the Russian frontline equivalent fielded in 1989, matches the AS90 at 24.7 km, but relies heavily on optical sighting with manual ballistic computation. PG1M panoramic, OP4M telescope, a gunner with a slide rule. The AS90 integrates ring laser gyro inertial navigation, automatic gun laying, and digital fire control.

It feeds directly into Ukraine’s homegrown crop fire direction software, which assigns the nearest available gun to a target with live atmospheric ballistics. Russian crews still mostly compute manually. Royal United Services Institute analyst Sam Cranny Evans noted in a 2023 assessment that Russia has tried to compensate via UAV cued reconnaissance fire and Kranipole laserg guided rounds, but forward observation remains weak and Krasnipole is degraded by cloud cover and electronic warfare.

Colonel Saheim Musienko, Deputy Commander of Rocket Forces and Artillery of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, told RBC Ukraine in late 2024 that across the M777, M109, PZH2000, AS90, Crab, and Archer, Western guns provide an advantage in both accuracy and range, provided crews are equipped with the proper amount and appropriate range of ammunition.

He cited Soviet ammunition’s calculated dispersion of 20 to 25 m against tighter western precision figures. The 117th Brigade itself in a public early 2025 statement via Militani declared the AS90 capable of inflicting devastating and crushing blows on the enemy with sniper accuracy. The verdict then, the honest verdict, because British engineering excellence does not require lying about it.

The AS90 did not win in Ukraine on raw range. Its 24.7 km reach is identical to the baseline Misti S and shorter than the longbarreled 2S5 Jatsint S. Where it wins is in the system around the gun. Burst rate of three rounds in 10 seconds, faster than any Russian system fielded in volume.

Digital fire control plugged into Cropiver, a fully enclosed climate controlled NBC turret. While the 2S5 exposes its crew during firing in a way that has proven catastrophic against drone saturated battlefields, NATO ammunition compatibility, including Excalibur, and crews trained at Lark Hill in shoot and scoot doctrine, treating survivability as a daily discipline rather than an afterthought.

According to Oric’s open- source intelligence tracking, by August 2025, Russia had lost roughly 246 MR S, 54 modernized MR SM2, 132 AATSIA, and 76 D30 howitzers visually confirmed across the Ukrainian battlefield. Ukrainian AS90 losses sit at approximately 19 vehicles visually confirmed, 13 destroyed and six damaged out of the roughly 68 transferred by mid 2025.

Crews specifically site Lancet loitering munitions as the dominant threat and consistently place the howitzers in reveted or concealed positions. A British howitzer that was being quietly retired for being too short, ranged, too tracked, too dated has now outlasted its own army’s frontline service by going to the front. Britain is replacing it not with another tracked howitzer, but with the KNDSRCH155, an unmanned automated turret on a boxer 8×8 chassis.

The UK announced its selection on April 23, 2024. On December 28, 2025, the UK and Germany signed a 52 million pound joint early capability demonstrator contract for three prototypes under the Trinity House agreement. The lesson Britain has written into its next artillery program comes directly from Ukrainian battlefields.

Mobility, automation, fires, range, return to that tree line. Aza stands beside a 45tonon British howitzer designed when the Cold War was still the relevant war. He has a tablet running Cropivivera. He has an interpreter’s worth of 3 weeks of Salsbury plane training in his crew’s muscle memory. He has Excalibur certified ammunition and a fire control computer that talks to drones overhead.

And he has sitting in his memory a Russian battery somewhere over the horizon, still using optics his grandfather would recognize. Comparing it to Soviet weapons, he says, is like comparing a Jaguli to a Mercedes E-Class. The numbers prove him right. The combat record proves him right. And the British Ministry of Defense, by stripping its own army of every operable AS90 to put them in his hands, has voted with the most expensive ballot any government can cast.

The old British Howitzer that nobody in Whiteall wanted anymore turned out to be exactly what the front line in Europe needed. British engineering three decades after it left the drawing board still doing work that Russian engineering cannot match. That is the story this gun tells. And it is not a story about a Mercedes.

It is a story about what gets built into a weapon when it is built right the first