ZALA Lancet attack drone. © Marina Lystseva/TASS
The Russian military has destroyed two more Western-made howitzers of Kiev forces using advanced Lancet loitering munitions.
On March 25 and 26, two videos surfaced online showing strikes against an FH70 and an M777 towed 155 mm howitzers of Kiev forces on an unspecified front in the special military operation zone. Both howitzers received direct hits.
The ZALA Aero Group, a subsidiary of Russia’s defense giant Kalashnikov, produces two versions of the Lancet, the Izdeliye-52 with an endurance of 40 minutes and a three-kilogram warhead and the larger Izdeliye-51 that has an endurance of an hour and is armed with a warhead weighting five kilograms.
Both versions of the loitering munition are equipped with an electro-optical system that can detect, track and lock on static and moving targets.
The FH70 howitzer has a range of 24 kilometers or up to 30 kilometers with extended range shells. The howitzer can fire a burst of three rounds in 15 seconds thanks to a unique semi-automatic loading system which consists of a loading tray and an automatic tube loader. Ukraine received ten such howitzers from Italy and later 24 others from Estonia.
The M777 howitzer has a maximum rate of fire of seven rounds per minute with a range of up to 40 kilometers when firing M982 Excalibur precision-guided rounds. Kiev forces have received 152 howitzers of this type so far. The U.S. provided 142, while Canada provided four and Australia six.
Many FH70 and M777 howitzers have been already destroyed or damaged by the Russian military, mainly with artillery fire and loitering munitions.
Kiev forces are still struggling to match the fire power and accuracy of the Russian military, despite receiving more than 800 artillery systems from their allies.
