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 tree line somewhere between Zaporizhzhia and Pokrovsk. 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 Zhiguli 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 inventory, 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 Abbot self-propelled gun and the American M109 it had supplemented it with. The trinational SP70 project, a joint British, German, and Italian howitzer program, was collapsing under cost overruns and political deadlock.
Vickers Shipbuilding and Engineering Limited, based in Barrow-in-Furness, 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, Vickers won the British Army’s Abbot replacement competition against three rivals, including the American M109 Paladin.
The contract was for 179 vehicles at 300 million pounds. 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 Cummins VTA 903 diesel producing 660 horsepower pushing it to 55 km/h on road with a 370 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 ordnance, 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 bleed 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 2008-2009 capability enhancement program added BAE Systems LINAPS 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 Raytheon M982 Excalibur GPS guided round following trials at Yuma Proving Ground. There were 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 2S19 Msta-S and fall 15 km short of modern L52 systems like the German PzH 2000, the French Caesar, the Polish Krab, and Ukraine’s own Bohdana. 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 Tapa. 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 Sunak on January 14th, 2023. 30 AS90s pledged alongside 14 Challenger 2 tanks. The first tranche delivered in 2023 totaled 32 vehicles, 20 battle ready and 12 stripped for spare parts.
A second tranche 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 30th, 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 Janes 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 Larkhill on Salisbury Plain in a compressed 3-week conversion course delivered primarily by 19 Regiment Royal Artillery. According to The Defense Post Lieutenant Colonel Ed Bottrell, 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 Operativny ZSU confirmed Ukrainian operators across open-source reporting include the Third Assault Brigade, the 49th Artillery Brigade Mstyslav the Brave out of Chernihiv the 58th Motorized Brigade, the 116th Mechanized Brigade firing on Kupiansk, the 117th Heavy Mechanized Brigade and the 151st Mechanized Brigade. Operations have been documented across the Zaporizhzhia, Kupiansk, Pokrovsk and Kursk axes. A Forbes relayed account picked up via Polish tech outlet WPTech 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 Asya was making. The Russian D-30, a 122 mm towed howitzer designed in 1963, has a maximum range of 15.4 km.
The 2S3 Akatsiya, a 152 mm self-propelled gun from 1971, manages 17.4 km. The 2S19 Msta-S, the Russian front-line equivalent fielded in 1989, matches the AS90 at 24.7 km, but relies heavily on optical sighting with manual ballistic computation. PG-1M panoramic, OP-4M 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 home-grown Kropyva 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 Krasnopol laser-guided rounds, but forward observation remains weak, and Krasnopol is degraded by cloud cover and electronic warfare. Colonel Serhii Musiienko, deputy commander of rocket forces and artillery of the Ukrainian armed forces, told RBC Ukraine in late 2024 that across the M777, M109, PzH 2000, AS90, Krab, 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 Militarni, 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. It’s 24.7 km reach is identical to the baseline Msta-S and shorter than the long-barreled 2S5 Giacint-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 Kropyva, 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 Larkhill in shoot and scoot doctrine, treating survivability as a daily discipline rather than an afterthought.
According to Oryx’s open-source intelligence tracking, by August 2025, Russia had lost roughly 246 Msta-S, 54 modernized Msta-SM2, 132 Akatsiya, and 76 D-30 howitzers visually confirmed across the Ukrainian battlefield. Ukrainian AS90 losses listed at approximately 19 vehicles visually confirmed, 13 destroyed and six damaged out of the roughly 68 transferred by mid-2025.
Crews specifically cite Lancet loitering munitions as the dominant threat and consistently employed the howitzers in riveted 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 KNDS RCH 155, 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, networked fires, range. Return to that tree line. Azure stands beside a 45-ton British howitzer designed when the Cold War was still the relevant war. He has a tablet running Croppy Ever. He has an interpreter’s worth of 3 weeks of Salisbury Plain 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 Zhiguli 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 white hall 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 time.
