Dear Readers:
According to this story, a Russian 25S Hyacinth-S self-propelled gun fought, and won, a duel against an American M777 howitzer.
This exciting event took place on the Gulyai-Pole front of the war, in the Zaporozhie Oblast. Readers may recall that Gulyai-Pole literally means “Walk-about field”, due to its past history as a place where open fairgrounds were held, in the Middle Ages. Later, this whole area became a home base for the Zaporozhian Cossacks.
RIA learned about the artillery duel from the Hyacinth gunner of the 305th Artillery Brigade “Ussuriysk” from the “East” group of the Russian Armed Forces. The gunner goes by the call name Yurich and controls the 152-mm business end of the self-propelled vehicle.
Yurich: “We had this incident with one of the Sevens [the M777]. It came rolling up towards us, but we had enough to give them a run for their money. The howitzer managed to get off a couple of shells, which flew by us, and we managed to suppress them on the fifth round.”
Yurich shared that his crew, when they are on rotation, go out, on average, 2 or 3 times. They are normally given 10 shells to destroy a target, but usually 2-5 shells are enough for what they have to do: “We don’t have any problems with replenishment, we have plenty of shells,” he confirmed.
The article concludes by reminding us that the U.S. provided Ukraine with a number of long-range 155-mm M777 howitzers. The Ukrainians have employed these American weapons in the shelling of the Donetsk and Luhansk Republics.
Awful Avalanche 
Hi Yalensis,
I’m very impressed that you have managed to keep up with your post a day promise… you always manage to find a story that I never see anywhere else! I’ve made an easier promise – to read your blog every day since you put the extra effort needed to actually write the article. Thank-you.
QK
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Thanks, Qolotlh! I really appreciate that.
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German politician, Norbert Röttgen [CDU], Chairman of the Bundestag foreign policy committee, proposed expelling Hungary and Slovakia from the European Union for their position on Ukraine:
“Viktor Orban is a “Trojan horse” for Russia [and] Slovak President Peter Pellegrini/Prime Minister Fico openly sympathize with Putin. The EU should cannot tolerate this any longer….these politicians have no place in the European Union”
Apparently, in today’s reunited “Germany” like in the US, democratic elections are only legitimate when the right-wing-extremists win in national parliamentary elections. I think I’ve seen this movie before….
https://russiasnews.com/germany-proposed-expelling-hungary-and-slovakia-from-the-eu/
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I don’t want to ruin the plot for those that haven’t seen the ending of the original version but…here’s a teaser image from that golden oldie. Good luck to Norbert Röttgen on remaking a classic disaster drama. With today’s “special-effects”, I am sure the climatic explosion scenes will be even better and…much..much..much bigger !!! Ooh boy, who of thought a German would be tagged to direct a sequel of WW II ? I…never thought I’d see the day…
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According to wikipedia, Article 7 of the EU Treaty does not provide a mechanism for expelling a country from the Union.
Therefore Mr. Rottweiler has no recourse except to kiss Orban’s goulash and boil in his own impotence.
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Interesting Y,
You’d think a German “Foreign Policy Chairman” would know the applicable law…huh? Sad to watch Germany fall to such a depth that such displays of incompetence are no longer uncommon.
But…reading the Wikipedia take on Article 7 of the EU Treaty, what it can do via Article 7, actually sounds more vindictive than expulsion…it takes away all of the benefits of being an EU member while preserving all the subject country’s obligations. It would appear that Bürgermeister Röttgen hyperbolic vitriol is intended to do just that, invoke EU suspension of rights and EU sanctions.
With the US backed Germans throwing Hungary/Slovakia off the train and both eastern European countries having legitimate claims on large swathes of lands wrongly ceded to Ukrainia in the near past…I would be surprised if the Kremlin did not take advantage of the 3LAs [which includes the US Department of State] clumsy blundering.
The requirement that all countries must prostrate themselves before DC’s dictata, if it ever was appropriate, belongs to the past…the unipolar era is long gone, thanks to DC’s daily display of incompetent vanity.
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Having a problem with this. ”It came rolling up towards us, but we had enough to give them a run for their money.” Are you sure this wasn’t an M-109? An M-777 is a towed field piece like a D30. It takes, under ‘combat conditions’ at least a minimum of 8 minutes to ready it (former Infantryman w/25 years in so yeah, I know how long it takes the cannon-cockers to set up under shitty conditions)
So, not doubting you or the story, but maybe -who- or -what- they were shooting at?
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Great question, Big Country. Sorry I can’t answer it, you clearly know much more about these machines than I do! The article WAS very clear that it was an M-777, with the soldier even slanging on the “the Sevens”.
Here is the paragraph in question, it is a bit slangy, soldier-talk, so there is a possibility I mis-translated although I am not sure how else to translate the gist of it:
“Был момент с “семерками” (американская гаубица М777. — Прим. ред.), они подкатились поближе, мы до них доставали на полном заряде. Они успели парочку (снарядов выпустить. — Прим. ред.) — и мимо, а мы на пятом их подавили”, — сказал военнослужащий.
I translated something like [this is the soldier talking]:
We had this moment with the “sevens” (i.e., the M-777). They [i.e., the “sevens”, i.e., the howitzer} came rolling up closer [so maybe being towed? but still “rolling up”], and we let them have it for a full charge. They managed to get off a couple [of shells], which flew by, and then we, on the fifth try, crushed them.
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I don’t know if you ever read anything by Jacques Baud, the Swiss military officer who’s been stationed with a lot of Amerikan and NATO forces in the past. As Qolotlh remarks above, you have plenty enough to do! But Baud had a recent interview, I think it was with the Duran boys, and also another long article, in which he detailed Russian military tactics vs. the Westie way. One of the points he made in the interview (at least the little bit that I watched) was that the American artillery pieces are designed to work like snipers — picking off specific targets. So accuracy is a key feature in their design. But the West doesn’t focus on cranking out oceans of shells, because who needs that when you’re focused on a “one-shot kill” dynamic. Whereas the Russians stick with their traditional tactics of barraging the hell out of wide areas. Not that there’s not some accuracy involved with them, but it’s more about massed fire. This orthogonal way of doing things is evidenced all the time in Ukraine. There’s so much that one can learn on the Internet — even about the “philosophy of artillery”…
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I did wonder about that “rolling towards us”. Unless he was watching it being towed (presumably via a drone). On the other hand, modern towed fieldpieces have auxiliary engines for moving about, so maybe this was an M777 moving under its own power — like that man who drove from town to town on his lawnmower.
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Possibly. I didn’t hear about the man who drove around on his lawnmower, but it sounds like a reasonable thing to do. While moving about, he could mow a few lawns here and there and perhaps earn some extra money for diesel!
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A few more things about artillery duels:
One, my mind keeps flashing back to that “Best In Hell” movie about urban combat, put out by Prigozhin’s Wagner Group. Jeez did that increase my understanding of how war is waged! I’ve been a history buff since I was a kid, have read stacks of books and watched enough hours of war movies to add up to months‘ worth of time. But I never viscerally grasped the “we smash you, then try to get away before you smash us back” dynamic until I saw that flick. Like the bits where the Yellow (Ukie) heavy mortar position was blasting the Whites, then got counter-attacked and the powder-burned commander ordered his men to keep shooting — until he got killed and there was only one last shell-shocked man standing. So real!
When you think about the distances involved with these cannonading contests, it’s amazing how far they throw shells. Because I ride my bicycle across the face of the Earth, I have a good feel for what, say, “15 kilometers” means. An hour’s worth of legwork on the pedals to move that far. And that’s if I’m riding on fklat ground. To think that artillerymen are able to take a metal tube, fill it with explosive material, heave a metal object on a sky-high arc, through variable wind, air pressure and temperature gradients, then have it fall within a small circle of probability on the other end of a distance that I’d be pumping for an hour to cover… A (deadly) miracle!
Lastly, a “war story” from my work in Crazyworld which involved counter-battery fire (of all things.) On the psych ward in Vancouver, we had a patient who was petrified of North Korea. This was circa 2013, even before the Trumptime hysteria about “Little Kim.” The Norks have long been a boogeyman for Westies, though — something to whip up hysteria.
The patient was a volatile, dangerous guy. Middle-aged, burly, strong, but brain-damaged, mostly due to decades of alcohol abuse and episodes of the DTs (delirium tremens). Going cold-turkey from the turps, when the police throw a man into a drunk tank for several days until he sobers up, kills lotsa neurons. These days, The Authoritahs manage withdrawal better and keep drunken prisoners pumped full of Valium, which wards off the shakes. If they’re merciful, that is. In Canada and Oz, they try to keep people — even disorderly miscreants — from getting brain damage. Imagine that, trying to protect a citizen who’s been bad. I don’t know how it goes in the U.S. (or Russia, for that matter). In Amerika, the thinking might be “we can’t give somebody VALIUM! It might make them happy. We want them to suffer. If they wind up retarded for life, well, that’s just how it goes in The Land Of Punishment.”
So this guy had an IQ that might have been in the 60s or 70s. He wasn’t that smart to begin with, according to his medical history, but would have been fit to be a dock worker or garbageman before he pickled his brain. When we had him, he was essentially punch-drunk all the time like an old boxer. He knew everyone else was sharper than him and that he couldn’t keep up. This made him nervous, so he was always on the edge of flying off the handle. He also had some “thought disorders” (the polite term for being cuckoo) due to the brain damage. He’d get paranoid about things, and since North Korea was in the news a lot at that time, he would fret angrily about how the North Koreans might be about to attack South Korea. Keep in mind that we were on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, but this guy agitated about it like the Norks were right across town.
We had to keep this guy in the locked-down part of the ward. People who made loud noises, as psych patients often do, would set him off and he might start punching on. Even in the “quiet rooms” (as they were euphemistically named) he would rage in fear about those evil North Koreans. I had recently read an article about how the U.S. and South Koreans planned to deal with an attack from the North. They have surveillance to know the Norks‘ firing positions, especially where the cannons that could hit Seoul are hidden in caves protected by blast-proof doors. It takes a certain amount of time to open the door, roll out the big gun, pop it off, and then pull it back into the cave. Those positions are pre-targeted by Westie airplanes, missiles and counter-battery guns that can vapourise the Norks before they can scurry to shelter.
I explained this to the frightened, brain-damaged guy, using my best simple-but-confident Bukko teaching style. “We can kick those North Koreans‘ asses as soon as they stick their heads out!” That reassured him enough (I had to repeat the lesson a lot because he had almost no ability to remember anything) so he directed his anxiety away from North Korea. Counter-battery combat as a psychiatric nursing intervention! Stuff like that is one of the reasons why I enjoy knowing a variety of disconnected information. One never knows when it will come in handy.
Unfortunately, the brain-damaged guy did something violent when I was not on duty. He had a nice case manager, an older social worker fellow who was trying to find a place where the patient could stay. He had a tendency to get kicked out of Skid Row housing. The case manager was on the ward a lot (patient was there for weeks because he was a placement problem) and demonstrated noble concern for this derro. One day he did something that set the patient off, and he bum-rushed the case manager. Broke the guy’s shoulder, gave him a head wound that bled all over the “quiet rooms” before he could be subdued — really messed up a decent man. We had to transfer control of the patient to the prison system, where they’re more focused on preventing violence. I don’t know what happened to the patient after that, but a slow-thinking, fight-prone 50-something would not have a good future in an environment filled with young aggro crims. And so it goes…
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It isn’t just paranoid schizos who are affected by the persistent propaganda. At the hospital where I work I knew a nurse (she has since retired) who was obsessed with North Korea and Kim Jong Un. I knew her because she was a “customer” of mine (me in IT, and I was assigned a project to write a report for her out of our database). Anyhow, this woman would go on and on about Kim and how evil he was, I could always tell whenever she had been listening to too much CNN in the lunchroom. How this evil man was getting ready to fire a nuke over Alaska and into the American mainland. (This same woman also suffered from Trump Derangement Syndrome, that goes without saying.)
One day, when we were meeting to discuss our project, she was ranting as usual, and there was pure kind of madness in her beady eyes, just like Captain Ahab whenever the conversation turned towards the topic of a certain sea mammal. As she ranted, I was just sitting and smirking at her, and she finally burst out with, “I don’t like that man at all!” [speaking of Kim Jong Un], how can you not see how evil he is?”
And I just shrugged and said: “I like him. I like him a lot. I think he’s a great guy.” That blew her mind, and she finally dropped it.
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“And I just shrugged and said: “I like him. I like him a lot. I think he’s a great guy.” That blew her mind”
And you were saying not long ago that you admired my chutzpah with the misguided debt collectors! I would not have had the chutz to pull that off…
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It was a safe move and didn’t require any real grit or courage on my part. This person was a wacko, and didn’t have the kind of power to get me in any trouble with my boss. My boss thought, and still thinks, that I walk on water!
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