Last week, a promotional video from the Kremlin caught the attention of Ukrainian media covering the war.
The clip showed an entrenched Russian crew firing an old, towed artillery system against Ukrainian positions in Donetsk.
The field gun featured: a D-74 122 mm howitzer, which the Soviet Union developed in the late 1940s.
Yet its age wasn’t the main attraction. Russia has, after all, been regularly deploying Cold War-era weaponry from its old stocks.
What’s surprising about the D-74 in Ukraine is that it’s not supposed to be in Russian inventory. The Soviet Union started producing them in 1955, but they were quickly superseded by another gun, the M-46, which fired 130 mm rounds at a longer range.
As the D-74 fell out of vogue, Moscow began exporting the guns to Soviet-friendly countries such as Vietnam and China, and it’s thought to have distributed away its entire arsenal.
Yet the gun has reappeared in Russian hands in Donetsk, leading Ukrainian media to discuss the possibility that it was …