1/ @CoverCabal and I have counted and identified both SPGs and towed artillery at russian storage bases and you can find our numbers in this thread or on Youtube. I have also added some interesting spots and answered some common questions below.
2/ First of all here are the numbers. Two tables are showing the decline in absolute numbers of SPGs and TA at the most important bases from 2021 to now and I have also attached a table showing the decline by system.
3/ Here is a comparison of our numbers with The Military Balance 2022. This is the first time that I have encoutered higher storage numbers found on satelite images compared to the numbers in TMB.
4/ Regarding the accuaracy our numbers, I am confident in the pre war count and identification of the SPGs but the towed artillery is much harder to identify, so the numbers might change in the future.
5/ Additionally not a lot of good satelite images were available, so we had to use lower resolution for some of the bases, which resulted in a lot of guessing and I had to rely strongly on the pre war identifications. Here is a table showing which dates we used:
6/ Below you can see an image from January 2024 showing some of the 2S19 at the 80th Arsenal. Interestingly the number of shadows created by the gun barrels doesnt match the the number of hulls signaling that Russia has removed the barrels from these systems.
7/ In general Russia has removed barrels from some of their higher caliber systems like 2S5, 2S7 and 2S19, but the available images dont allow an accurate count of that. I will make a seperate thread on this topic soon.
8/ When identifying the towed artillery I realised that many of the systems have features that make them very recognizable on satelite imges, but the D-20, D-1 and M-30 are hard to distinguish, which is why grouped them together.
9/ The three systems are all stored in the same position and without a size reference nearby and optimal image quality they are very hard to tell apart. I will post individual threads on all bases in the future, where I take some time and try to re-identify the towed artillery
10/ The Military Balance 2023 states that 2000 122mm M-30 are in storage, which if true represents almost a third of the remaining towed artillery stocks. This system started production in 1940, has a range of about 12km and was heavily used in WW2 by the red army.
11/ Since Russia still has large amounts of more modern 122mm systems (D-30, 2S1) in storage and the limiting factor for this caliber seems to bee ammunition I think it is safe to asume that we wont be seeing any M-30 in Ukraine.
12/ Another interesting system is the 130mm M-46, of which Russia has about 600 left in storage at the base near Shuchuchye, after sending some of them to Syria. These howitzers are very recognizable because of the smaller wheels at the back.
13/ Russia doesnt actively operate artillery with 130mm caliber, so it is unclear how useful the stored howitzers are, but considering that both North Korea and Iran operate the M-46 they can probably get suplied with 130mm ammunition.
14/ I really wanted to find the 40 M-1931 B4s listed by TMB2022 but I couldnt, so If anyone comes across them please tag me. I dont think they are really relevant to this conflict, but it would be interesting to see if they still exist.
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