Navy of the Armed Forces of Ukraine has published a report about shooting training involving coast artillery systems and ship armament. The training is said to help Ukrainian marines when repelling russian missile and drone attacks since a significant portion of the missiles are coming from the Black Sea to the east of the country.
Nothing unusual about the drills themselves at first sight but the nuances are hidden in details.
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One of these details is the "gun truck" with a 2M-3M naval gun mounted on top. It may look like a wartime improvisation but apparently it is the very same vehicle that was first demonstrated by the Ukrainian Navy back in 2021 during the drills near Ochakiv.
The 2M-3M anti-aircraft autocannon has a declared range 7.5 km (~4.7 miles) and altitude ceiling of 2.5 km (~1.6 miles); it used to be installed on almost every class of Soviet warships. However, due to the non-standard 25mm caliber and all the resulting issues with ammunition production and supply, making such "gun trucks" became rather a forced exception than a trend for the Ukrainian military.
Another notable detail about the recent Navy training is that the photos also feature Island-class patrol boats, although it's not clear whether those are two different ships or the same one since the identification numbers and vessel names were removed. As we can see, the primary weapons are 2M-3M, too – this is an important detail since earlier Ukraine expected to arm their Island boats with American weapons.
As a reminder, Ukraine got at least four former US Coast Guard Island-class boats prior to the russian full-scale invasion. The first two, named Sloviansk and Starobilsk, came unarmed in 2019; they were expected to get weapons from domestic manufacturers. According to the report from the Navy dated March 8, 2022, the Sloviansk ship sunk after a russian attack, the crew received honorary awards by Presidential Decree.
Two more boats arrived in 2021, the fifth should have been delivered by the end of the year, too, but there were no reports about it since russia directed its invasion forces toward Ukraine a few months afterward. There was no opportunity to know whether the new boats actually got US weapons either. The protection screens on the 2M-3M gun we can see in the new photos most likely were installed during the war, other than that, there is nothing different from how they looked before the invasion.
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