Since the official launch of the training courses in April or May 2025, the Bundeswehr and KNDS Deutschland have together trained more than 600 Ukrainian soldiers on the RCH 155 wheeled howitzer.
The Bundeswehr announced this on its website on the 10th of March 2026, following a visit by Minister of Defence Boris Pistorius to the Artillery School in Idar-Oberstein.
Upon inquiry, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Defence confirmed to me the aforementioned number of trained soldiers, but declined to provide further details on grounds of “military and operational security”.
However, the large number of Ukrainian soldiers who have already been trained on the wheeled howitzer is extremely interesting for a variety of reasons and suggests a deployment in Ukraine that has not yet been confirmed.
A glance at the training programme
The training programme, which lasts several weeks and takes place at locations including the Baumholder military training area and at KNDS Deutschland in Kassel, is divided into several phases.
During the first phase of their training, Ukrainian soldiers undergo a tightly scheduled driving course on the GTK Boxer – a slightly modified version of which serves as the basis for the RCH 155 – and are taught additional technical fundamentals, enabling them, amongst other things, to carry out a certain level of maintenance.
The fact that, put simply, the initial focus is on practising driving or operating the vehicle is standard practice in all Bundeswehr training courses involving vehicles.
During the driving training, the Ukrainian men and women practise, amongst other things, slalom driving over rough terrain, reversing manoeuvres with limited visibility and driving on extremely steep gradients. Everything is kept as realistic as possible so that the soldiers are prepared for all possible scenarios in Ukraine.
Only then will the several weeks of training on the artillery system itself begin. This is likely to be very similar to the training on the PzH 2000. In basic terms, this involves aiming, loading and firing on the simulator, as well as in the field. Here too, maintenance of the artillery system is likely to form at least a small part of this training phase.
More than 600 Ukrainian soldiers have now completed this lengthy and, for both instructors and trainees, highly intensive process, either in full or at least in part. A figure that made me very suspicious at first.
After all, this means that, officially, since the end of April 2025 or early May 2025 – in around 10 months – industry and the Bundeswehr have trained over 100 more Ukrainian soldiers on the RCH 155 alone than they did previously at the same location between May 2022 and September 2024 – in roughly 28 months – on the PzH 2000 and MARS II combined. And this, it should be noted, despite the well-known technical problems with the artillery system itself.
Considering this and a few other factors, I initially expressed more than just a little scepticism about the figure “600” in public. However, I too make mistakes and would like to admit this publicly here as well.
Naturally, I contacted the German Ministry of Defence on the very same day to ask for confirmation of the number of trained soldiers, and they confirmed it once again: “The statements in the article we published are correct”, said a spokesperson for the Ministry of Defence.
How it was possible to train such a comparatively huge number of soldiers in such a short space of time, however, remains a well-kept secret, at least for the foreseeable future.
Is the RCH 155 already deployed in Ukraine?
But this raises an important question for me. Why were so many soldiers trained on this specific artillery system?
After all, at least officially, not a single one of these state-of-the-art wheeled artillery systems is actually deployed in Ukraine.
Previously publicly announced deliveries have been repeatedly postponed for a variety of reasons, and neither Russian nor Ukrainian units have, to my knowledge, released any image or video footage showing the deployment of an RCH 155 self-propelled artillery system in Ukraine.
In fact, the first wheeled howitzers should have been deployed in Ukraine some time ago. In an interview with SPIEGEL published at the end of 2023, Axel Scheibel, now CTO of KNDS Deutschland, announced that the first units would be handed over to Ukraine by the end of 2024.
At the end of 2024, Ralf Ketzel, then CEO of KNDS Deutschland, announced in an interview with hartpunkt that the first systems would be delivered in April 2025.
At least formally, the first RCH 155 produced in Kassel for Ukraine was handed over in January 2025 in the presence of Minister of Defence Boris Pistorius and Ambassador Oleksii Makeiev.
During the ceremonial handover, Ketzel reiterated that it was expected that training on the artillery system would be completed in April of that year, after which a delivery to Ukraine would be arranged.
However, as mentioned earlier, the training did not officially begin until a few months later, in late April or early May 2025. Since then, there has been a long period of strict silence.
In June 2025, I published an article discussing the delays in bringing the RCH 155 into service. This was picked up a few months later, in August 2025, when the Ukrainian edition of Deutsche Welle mentioned it in an interview with the now former KNDS Deutschland CEO.
According to Ketzel, following its handover in January, the first wheeled howitzer was initially subjected to extensive testing and evaluation, and training on the system led to several modifications. As of August 2025 – seven months after the handover of the first RCH 155 – KNDS Deutschland was still working on various issues, whilst the integration of the wheeled howitzer into the Ukrainian combat management system was also still pending.
At the time, he assumed that, once the work had been completed, at least some of the systems would be ready for delivery in the coming months.
According to the German Ministry of Defence, the original plan was to deliver six units in 2025, whilst the remaining 48 wheeled howitzers – which have been ordered in several batches since 2022 at a total cost of €890 million – are due to be delivered to Ukraine by the end of 2028.
However, it remains unclear what happened between August 2025 and March 2026, whether all problems were resolved and whether deliveries to Ukraine have since been made.
Given the large number of trained soldiers, however, I now find it somewhat difficult to believe that the RCH 155 was never deployed at the front, or at least is not currently being used there. Nevertheless, there is no evidence to support this.
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