The West is trying to starve the wrong part of Russia’s war machine, defense experts say

Defense experts argue the West should sanction key materials and components needed for Russian artillery.

For centuries, a key to battlefield victory has been destroying the enemy’s artillery. Left unmolested, the big guns could devastate troops, vehicles, fortifications and supply lines. Thus, nations have resorted to cavalry charges, tank blitzes, bombs and howitzers to take out the enemy cannon.

But this is easier said than done for Ukraine. Russian artillery has inflicted 70% of Ukrainian casualties, which are estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands; in the First and Second World Wars, by comparison, that proportion was roughly around 60%. Using weapons such as drones and HIMARS battlefield rockets, Ukraine has had some success in denting Moscow’s arsenal: the Ukrainian military recently estimated that it has destroyed more than 10,000 Russian artillery pieces.

Yet by mobilizing to a war economy, Russia has been able to amass 4,780 pieces of tube artillery such as howitzers, and 1,130 multiple rocket launchers in Ukraine as of February 2024, according to Ukrainian estimates. In addition to deploying more artillery than Ukraine, Russia has also been able to fire an average of 10,000 shells per day, while ammunition shortages have limited Ukrainian guns to less than 1,800 daily.

It’s clear that Ukraine needs to take out those Russian guns, or be smothered under shellfire. It is primarily artillery that is enabling Russia’s ground force, which includes mercenaries, freed convicts and unwilling conscripts, to make plodding advances despite hideous losses in the Donetsk region. Ukraine lacks the firepower — such as strike aircraft — to decisively erode Russia’s artillery edge.

A team of Western and Ukrainian experts offers an alternative: Trying to prevent those guns from being built in the first place. Researchers mapped out the complex supply chain that maintains Russia’s artillery, which consumes huge amounts of ammunition and wears out gun barrels at a rapid pace.

“Disrupting Russia’s access to ammunition and new artillery barrels should therefore be a central focus for which Russia’s supply chains are truly vulnerable,” urged the report by the Royal United Services Institute think tank, and the Open Source Center, a British open-source intelligence non-profit.

The RUSI team argues that Western sanctions should target the artillery supply chain rather than primarily focusing on blocking advanced tech like microelectronics from reaching Russia.

“It is more difficult to secretly transfer thousands of tons of chromium ore into a country than to smuggle in a few thousand microchips,” the report said; chromium is used in artillery barrel manufacturing.

Endowed with vast natural resources and a huge Soviet-era defense industrial base, Russia is self-sufficient for many of its military needs. But the RUSI team zeroed in on two requirements where Russia depends on imports: Machine tools and raw materials that are essential for casting or refurbishing artillery barrels, and for producing artillery shells.

A worker inspects the form of the shaped steel billets as part of the process of producing 155mm artillery shells at the Scranton Army Ammunition Plant in Pennsylvania. 

Until 2022, Russia depended on Western-supplied machine tools, especially advanced computer numerical control, or CNC, automated systems. Sanctions imposed in 2023 slashed imports of Western equipment, but China has been able to fill much of the gap, though “Russian companies have historically preferred Western machine tools over Chinese equivalents, as they are more precise and higher quality,” the report noted. However, China and other nations re-export Western tools to Russia. RUSI identified at least 2,113 companies that supplied Western tools to Russia in 2023 and early 2024, including equipment from Germany, South Korea, Italy, Japan and Taiwan.

Manufacturing artillery barrels is a rigorous task that requires highly specialized manufacturing facilities. Just as US defense manufacturing has consolidated into a few prime contractors who can build jets and ships, only four Russian companies can forge artillery barrels: Zavod No. 9 in Yekaterinburg; Titan-Barrikady in Volgograd; MZ/ SKB in Perm; and the Burevestnik Research Institute in Nizhny Novgorod, according to the report. Each company has its own supply chain of subcontractors, such as factories that make special steel.

As for raw materials, Russia imports about 55% of the high-quality chromium needed to harden gun barrels. It also depends on Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan to supply much of the cotton cellulose that is a crucial ingredient in the nitrocellulose used to make explosives. There are three primary manufacturers of artillery ammunition in Russia — NIMI Bakhirev, the Plastmass Plant and KBP Shipunov — which also rely on a web of contractors and suppliers.

Evidence suggests that sanctions on these links in the supply chain can work. For example, Khlopkoprom-Tsellyuloza, a Kazakh company that was a major supplier of cotton cellulose to two Russian propellant factories, slashed its exports when those factories were sanctioned, RUSI pointed out. Indeed, Kazakhstan is now supplying cotton cellulose for NATO ammunition.

Current Western sanctions tend to be too broad and sporadic to cripple Russian defense production. A better approach would be a mixture of economic sanctions and diplomatic pressure focused on Russia’s artillery supply chain, concluded the report. “A concerted approach, with additional resources dedicated to enforcement and disruption, will have a greater chance of success.”

Still, there are some questions, such as how long it would take sanctions to benefit Ukraine’s hard-pressed military. Sanctions are an economic equivalent of strategic bombing: an indirect way to prevent enemy weapons from reaching the battlefield. But the massive Allied bombing campaign against Germany in World War II took years to produce significant results, and even then, the Third Reich was able to find workarounds to increase production despite the damage. In fact, the bomber offensive didn’t achieve success until it stopped targeting the entire German economy, and concentrated on a few key sectors, such as German oil production.

Focused sanctions against the artillery supply chain will certainly spur Russia to find new ways of evading those measures. The Kremlin will enjoy the connivance of other nations, especially China, Turkey and various Central Asian nations.

Nonetheless, sanctions might ultimately prove to be a more effective approach than trying to destroy Russian artillery in combat. For Ukraine, the best Russian weapon is one that it never has to fight.