Ukraine receives first RCH 155 howitzers after years of delay

Ukraine has received its first RCH 155 wheeled howitzers, according to German Aid to Ukraine (GAU), an independent tracker of military assistance to Ukraine, which said September 5 it had confirmed the delivery through a source outside political and industry circles.

The system arrives roughly four years after Germany first pledged it, in September 2022.

GAU said it had held off confirming the delivery for months despite public hints, since neither Ukrainian nor Russian sources had published photos or video of the system inside Ukraine, and the program’s history of missed deadlines made earlier claims difficult to verify. Nicholas Drummond, an advisor to manufacturer KNDS Deutschland, suggested on X in early July that the first RCH 155 had reached Ukrainian forces and could now be called “combat proven.” Weeks later, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said during a visit to KNDS Deutschland that the howitzer had been “very well received” in Ukraine, without directly confirming a delivery.

The RCH 155 combines a highly automated 155mm/L52 gun system, known as the Artillery Gun Module, with the wheeled GTK Boxer armored vehicle chassis. The system can carry 30 shells and 144 modular propellant charges, and depending on the ammunition used, can fire out to roughly 70 kilometers (43 miles). It is also built to fire while the vehicle is moving, a capability GAU described as new for this class of weapon, though industry publication hartpunkt reported as of late 2025 that this only works on certain terrain and at speeds up to 30 km/h (19 mph).

Germany ordered a total of 54 RCH 155 units for Ukraine, split into three batches of 18, at a cost to the German government of €890 million ($1.03 billion). More than 600 Ukrainian soldiers had completed RCH 155 training, including on the underlying GTK Boxer platform, as of March 2026, according to GAU.

The path to delivery involved repeated delays. Industry analysts predicted as early as 2022 that the first systems would not arrive before 2025. KNDS said in August 2023 that delivery was expected in the first quarter of 2024, then pushed that to the end of 2024 by that November, according to German magazine Der Spiegel. The first unit was formally handed over in January 2025 in a ceremony attended by Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany, Oleksii Makeiev, and Pistorius, but the howitzer remained in Germany afterward so Ukrainian crews could train on it at KNDS’s facility in Kassel and the Bundeswehr’s artillery school in Idar-Oberstein. That training was originally expected to wrap up by around April 2025, a timeline KNDS’s then-CEO Ralf Ketzel also cited that November. When the deadline slipped again, KNDS’s chief executive told Deutsche Welle’s Ukrainian service in August 2025 that changes identified during training, along with integration work tied to Ukraine’s battle management system, had caused further delays. It was not until July 2026 that public signs of an actual handover or deployment resurfaced.

Drummond has said Ukrainian crews have consistently hit targets at a range of 40 kilometers (25 miles) with the first round fired from the system, a claim GAU noted has not yet been backed by detailed performance reporting. GAU said it has not yet obtained independent confirmation of how the RCH 155 has performed in combat conditions, or how many of the 54 ordered units have reached Ukraine so far.