Recently, the so-called Western operative command of the belarusian army has announced an upcoming receipt and adoption of a new type of artillery rockets for their multiple launch rocket systems, Belaruski Hajun monitoring group reports. The new type of rocket has an increased range of fire up to 40 km and improved accuracy.
The Command stated that these rockets "enable successful counter-battery combat against the enemy's artillery", however, the supplier of this ammunition is not specified. In that regard, Belaruski Hajun recalls that last December, the belarusian military reported about successful tests of ammunition for their domestically-made BM-21 Grad MLRS, suggesting that this locally-produced ammunition might be the one entering service now.
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The Belarusian Defense Ministry began setting up the production of 122-mm rockets back in November 2022, around the same Ukrainian intelligence services stated that russia was trying to induce belarus and iran into making for ammunition for the russian army. Moreover, the intelligence assumed that belarusian specialists would learn to assemble and make various types of projectiles from the iranians.
However, the current rates of 122mm rocket production remains unknown. In July, President Lukashenko visited a facility where he was shown these rockets, assembled manually by belarusian workers; he announced plans to reach an annual production rate of 15,000 rockets. Notably, it's not only the final assembly that is done by hand, some components are made this way, too, which in itself raises doubts about the country's ability to expand the production enough to achieve the set goal.
According to data from The Military Balance 2023, the belarusian army has overall 128 units of BM-21 Grad MLRS in service. As a reminder, in 2021 belarus presented a modernization of this rocket system called Shkval.
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