The Russian occupiers had imported 203 mm projectiles, which were probably obtained from Iran, and were intended for firing from American-made M110 self-propelled artillery.
Russia may receive missiles from Iran
This indicates bottlenecks in the Russian projectile industry
This was reported by Defense Express.
The "Ukrainian Informator" resource put the relevant images into open access. At the same time, you can also find indications that in 2023 the Rashist gunners received firing tables for "Product 203", which may serve as indirect confirmation that the Russian Federation did begin to receive 203-mm projectiles by import.
Among all Kremlin satellites, only Iran currently has 203 mm artillery, according to which The Military Balance 2023 indicates the presence of 30 M110 self-propelled guns and 20 M115 towed guns. In the same North Korea, the largest barrel artillery caliber is 170 mm, Koksan self-propelled guns, and the same China is still working on its own 203 mm caliber artillery systems.
If you take a closer look at the photo, you immediately notice the asymmetry of the pattern, according to which the shells were marked in Latin. From which we can make an assumption that in this case we are talking about US-standard projectiles for the M110 and M115 artillery systems, the production of which could be established by Iran under the "reengineering" scheme.
There are indications in open sources that Iran acquired its M110 and M115 from the US as early as the 1970s. From which we can conclude that if the Iranians had a stockpile of shells received from the USA, then, most likely, it was fired back in the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-1988. Therefore, Tehran had to replenish this ammunition independently.
If we continue to talk specifically about the Russian Federation, then at first glance the picture may look like this — they say, the aggressor received another source of projectiles supplied by a partner on the "axis of evil", and this time we are talking about a particularly powerful caliber of 203 millimeters.
But there is another side to this situation — the fact of importing 203-mm projectiles, probably from Iran, means that the Rashists were unable to establish their own production of ammunition of this caliber in the necessary volumes. Although data on the start of own production of 203-mm projectiles at the facilities of the Russian military industry became known as early as the fall of 2022.
In addition, this also means that the option of buying Soviet 203-mm shells for the Pion self-propelled guns from among the user countries in the post-Soviet space, or from other operators of this artillery system, was unavailable to the Russians.
Iran uses the Caspian Sea to send weapons to the Russian Federation
Journalists write that the tracking data shows that vessels in the region are increasingly "closed", which indicates an increasing intention to hide the movement of goods.
Data from analysts at Lloyd's List Intelligence showed that the number of gaps in vessel tracking data in the Caspian Sea increased in September.
This happened shortly after the governments of the United States and Ukraine said that Moscow had purchased drones from Tehran last summer, the publication notes.
Between August and September 2022, there was an overall jump in the number of vessels in the Caspian Sea that turned off tracking data. Until 2023, the number of gaps in vessel tracking data remains large.
