In addition to air defence and armoured vehicles, one of Germany’s primary areas of assistance for Ukraine is artillery, or more precisely, the assistance with modern artillery systems and ammunition of various calibres.
Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine back in 2022, Germany has delivered 27 self-propelled artillery systems to Ukraine from Bundeswehr stocks or via the industry, while almost 90 additional ones will be delivered in the coming years.
The RCH 155, one of the most modern and effective artillery systems in the world, makes up the majority of the artillery systems currently still on order for Ukraine by Germany. As of today, 54 of them are to be delivered by around 2028/2029.
This is an excellent example of Germany’s long-term assistance for Ukraine in its courageous fight against Russian aggression and over the past two days, we have received some interesting updates on this project.
As a spokesperson for the German Ministry of Defence announced at today’s Federal Press Conference, Germany will be able to hand over the first RCH 155 self-propelled artillery system to Ukraine as early as next week.
Image: KNDSHowever, it is quite possible that this is not a delivery to the Ukrainian army the way most people would imagine, but that it is only being formally transferred into Ukrainian ownership so that Ukrainian soldiers can start their training on the system here in Germany, which would be standard practice.
After all, KNDS Deutschland CEO Ralf Ketzel told hartpunkt in an interview as recently as November 2024 that the first system would not be delivered to Ukraine until April 2025.
This means that there is still uncertainty about the start of deliveries, which have been rescheduled several times since the first batch of 18 units — worth around €216 million — was originally announced back in 2022.
However, this is also mainly because this system is not yet in active use in any army around the world and therefore the industrial capacities were not really available at the time and consequently had to be established first.
Regardless of whether Ukraine is able to deploy the first system on the battlefield, at least in theory, in January or only three months later in April, the delivery will certainly only have a very localized impact anyway.
After all, according to the German Minister of Defence Boris Pistorius, just six RCH 155s are to be delivered to Ukraine this year. Larger quantities are only expected to be delivered to Ukraine at the beginning of next year.
Of course, this does not mean that there will be no additional deliveries. A government spokesperson announced last year that Germany will supply more than 20 artillery systems to Ukraine in 2025.
If we consider that six RCH 155s will be delivered this year and that only one of the twelve PzH 2000s bought in Qatar last year is still to be delivered, all 14 of the still pledged Zuzana 2s would have to be delivered over the course of 2025 if the government spokespersons statement is still correct.
Image: 16th Artillery BrigadeTogether with Denmark and Norway, Germany ordered a total of 16 of these artillery systems in Slovakia during the first year of the war. The costs, amounting to €92 million, were shared equally by all three countries.
However, the procurement is anything but a success story. To date, at least officially, just two Zuzana 2s have been delivered to Ukraine, while last year, for example, there was not a single delivery, even though the delivery of four Zuzana 2s had been announced.
So we can only hope that not only the deliveries of the Zuzana 2s will finally be completed this year, but also that Ukraine will be able to deploy the RCH 155 on the battlefield as soon as possible.
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