The Russian occupation army could have lost for the first time in Ukraine its rather rare the Penicillin artillery reconnaissance system - this conclusion can be drawn from one of the obituaries of a Russian military officer, which was noticed by OSINT researchers.
In particular, a Twitter user with the nickname Necro Mancer draws attention to the fact that the Russians published an obituary on their social networks for one of the officers of the Russian army, Nikolai Nikolayevich Kuznetsov, who, after graduating from the Mikhailovsky Military Artillery Academy (St. Petersburg), went to fight in Ukraine in July 2022.
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As noted, Kuznetsov managed to survive on the war for about ten months and was finnaly destroyed on May 18, 2023. It is separately noted that Kuznetsov "performed tasks at the Penicillin acoustic-thermal artillery-reconnaissance system". Considering this, it can be cautiously assumed that the lieutenant's "resignation" may well be connected with the loss of the system - this is really important news.
So far, there have been no reports of losses by the russians of the 1B75 Penicillin acoustic-thermal artillery-reconnaissance system. It is known that the production of this system in the russian federation began in 2020. The first samples of the system entered the russian army only two years ago - in 2021. According to data from open sources, the russian Armed Forces have a fairly small number of such systems in service - the fact that the russians really lost one of these systems in Ukraine will be all the more valuable.
Defense Express wrote about the fact that the invaders planed to use the Penicillin system on the battlefield more than a year ago – at the end of March 2022, it was reported that the enemy planed to transfer four 1B75 Penicillin artillery reconnaissance systems to the Kharkiv direction.
Russian propaganda media began actively promoting the system already in October 2022, talking about the fact that the 1B75 Penicillin acoustic-thermal artillery-reconnaissance system is the answer to NATO artillery. At that time, the russian mass media wrote that "several systems" were tested on a battlefield, which allegedly demonstrated their effectiveness, in particular, against Western artillery systems, as well as against HIMARS missile systems.
Already in March of this year, the Russians announced that they plan to double the number of the 1B75 Penicillin artillery reconnaissance systems on the battlefield by the end of this year – however, it is currently difficult to estimate how many such systems russia can use in Ukraine.
We will remind that the 1B75 Penicillin is an artillery reconnaissance system, which should detect the positions of barrel and rocket artillery, as well as anti-aircraft and tactical missiles.
According to the occupiers, the system can detect the positions of the enemy's artillery systems at a range of up to 25 km (in some sources - up to 50 km), the time to obtain the coordinates of the target is five seconds or less. At the same time, the range of communication with other "subscribers" is up to 40 km. As noted, the Penicillin system can adjust the fire of both one battery and each battery of the division in turn.
According to experts, a serious advantage of the russian the Penicillin system is the absence of unmasking factors during work. This is due to the fact that all the main components of the system work only as receiver – therefore t is difficult to detect the system by means of SIGINT or to suppress with EW systems, since only the radio station works in transmission mode - therefore, the destruction of such a system is a particularly valuable achievement of the defenders of Ukraine.
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