Money spent on production upgrades is getting results in Ukraine and in Europe. Now Ukraine is one of the world’s most prolific howitzer manufacturers.

April 28, 2025

One year after a US embargo on arms shipments left Ukrainian gunners catastrophically short of ammunition and cannon, the artillery of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) is bulking up with hundreds of modern howitzers manufactured at home and a burgeoning European supply chain feeding those guns – so far – at a clip north of 100,000 individual munitions a month.

Jana Černochová, the Czech Republic’s defense minister, in Sunday evening comments on the national news program Otázky Václava Moravec, said a Prague-led coalition for sourcing large-caliber artillery ammunition to Ukraine in the first four months of 2025 had delivered 400,000 shells to the Ukrainian military, and that funding for more ammunition at those volumes had been secured until autumn.

Czechia, in late 2023, proposed a cross-continent effort to source in European and international markets artillery ammunition for Ukraine’s military. The initiative gained support over 2024 with Canada, Norway, Denmark, Belgium and Netherlands, among others, contributing funding or domestic shell production capacity to fill new orders.

The US, in late November 2023, halted all arms transfers to Ukraine, including for artillery ammunition. That embargo ended in May 2024.

Ukraine, via the “Czech Ammunition Initiative,” received about 1.5 million artillery shells of various calibers in 2024, Černochová said. AFU generals said the European ammunition assistance partially filled a dangerous gap left by Washington’s refusal to send ammo for the first five months of that year, helping to prevent the collapse of defenses in some sectors.

The Czech-language CNN-run platform Prime News, citing Foreign Minister Jan Lipavský, said that thanks to European collective efforts to deliver shell in quantity to the Ukrainian military, Russia’s once dominant artillery firepower advantage has been dramatically reduced – from about ten Russian shells vs one Ukrainian in past battles, to about two to one in 2025.

Russian and Ukrainian service personnel usually say the weight of Ukrainian and Russian artillery fire is roughly even, with Moscow’s forces having somewhat more shells to shoot, but Kyiv’s gunners firing at longer ranges and more accurately.

The Ukraine-based military research group Conflict Capital, in an April 24 report called “Ammunition Breakthrough: The Math Behind Europe’s Artillery Surge,” said that Europe has decisively replaced the US to become Ukraine’s main supplier of shell, and that production volumes are on track to increase more.

A new manufacturing plant operated by the British defense firm BAE Systems near the town of Glascoed, should come online in Fall 2024, and once fully operational, will be capable of churning out annually a half million 155mm artillery shells – a NATO-standard caliber widely used by Ukrainian artillery units. The facility should surge UK artillery ammunition production 16-fold, the report said.

Plans announced in late 2023 by Germany’s massive arms manufacturer Rheinmetall to step up artillery shell production likewise are on track, the report said, and facilities primarily in Germany and Spain will likely manufacture 750,000 shells of all types over 2025, with expansion to a yearly 1.1 million shell capacity by 2027, the report said. Those numbers matched Rheinmetall’s public statements.

The Conflict Capital report said that France’s Nexter-KNDS will, in 2025, probably be able to deliver 100,000+ finished shells and 96,000 casings for assembly elsewhere, Poland’s PGZ will be targeting a 150,000 shell volume, and Czechia’s STV will probably stabilize production at 150,00 units a year.

Collectively, European shell manufacturers will, per that data, probably produce about two million artillery shells in 2025, about twice the 2024 figure. Key bottlenecks include explosive materials like TNT, RDX, IMX-104, and nitrocellulose for propellants, but continental output rising to 2.4 million shells in 2026 and even accelerating after that is possible, the report said.

The US, since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, has sent Kyiv about two million shells, largely drawn from existing stocks – or about 600,000 shells a year. By those numbers, a possible cutoff of made-in-USA artillery ammo deliveries to Ukraine – most recently the Trump administration stopped all arms transfers to Kyiv for about two weeks in March 2025 – could be more than covered by rising European production, the report says.

“In just three years, Europe has gone from ‘almost handmade’ production in 2022 to output levels rivaling China’s,” the report says.

“In just three years, Europe has gone from ‘almost handmade’ production in 2022 to output levels rivaling China’s,” the report says.

An April 24 report by Estonia’s ERR news said that construction of a military explosive facility using shale oil as a raw material will break ground in Pärnu County in 2025 and begin production of RDX – a widely used shell explosive – In 2028. Start-up cost will be $8.17 million (€7.2 million) and total cost will be $120-130 million (€120–130 million), and annual output will be 600 tons of RDX/year, the report said, citing Minister of Defense Hanno Pevkur.

Already in operation is a joint Rheinmetall-Ukroboronprom 155mm shell line in Ukraine, aiming to produce 80,000–100,000 shells in 2025. Ukrainian news platforms say the new Rheinmetall-financed facility will complement production of Soviet-era caliber (152mm and 122mm) shells manufactured in Ukraine for decades.

Ukraine’s home-grown howitzer producers have similarly expanded output to give the AFU, for the first time in its existence, a beefy supply of modern, combat-capable artillery pieces. By some measures, the guns are coming off the line so fast that Ukraine has become one of the world’s leading artillery systems manufacturers, some news reports said.

A Friday report by the research group Army Technology said that Ukrainian production of the domestically developed Bohdana 155mm howitzer has, since Russian full-scale invasion, shot up from six systems a month to more than 20 a month, and output could be as high as 36 systems a month.

A rugged wheeled howitzer, similar to the French Caesar artillery system, the Bohdana is popular with Ukrainian artillerymen for simplicity of build, ease of operation, and high-grade barrel and sighting equipment making possible precise long-range fires.

Ukraine’s national Defense Procurement Agency has credited European state investment into Ukrainian artillery manufacturing for the surge in Bohdana production, and for the advanced dies and tools needed to manufacture a NATO-standard artillery system fully capable of firing the full range of modern 155mm munitions, the report says.

Those production figures, translating to a theoretical 432 made-in-Ukraine Bohdanas a year, compare favorably with China’s wheeled PCL-181 howitzer coming off a People’s Republic line at about 200 units a year, or South Korea’s tracked K-9 howitzer, currently manufactured by Hanwa Aerospace at about 240 units a year, the Ukrainian OSINTtechnical military news platform reported on Sunday.

“The capacity (to produce Bohdana howitzers), especially raw barrel production, is an immense leap for the Ukrainian defense industry,” the report says in part.

https://www.kyivpost.com/post/51635