Ukraine’s Armed Forces Recall Thousands of Dud Mortars

Domestically manufactured mortar rounds are substandard and sometimes cannot be relied on to hit what they’re aimed at. On Tuesday the Ukrainian military issued a recall of tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition in the hands of at least seven combat brigades, news reports and official statements said.

The Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) announcement said Ukraine-manufactured 120mm mortar rounds issued to troops had been recalled because of quality issues, without specifying the numbers of munitions or the units affected.

The official statement cited poor-quality propelling charges and improper storage as problems already identified by state investigators, with examination of the issues continuing. Troops will be issued with “imported” mortar rounds and the State Bureau of Investigation has initiated criminal proceedings, the statement added.

Since early November Ukraine’s news media has reported, with increasing anger, production-quality issues affecting Ukraine-produced 82mm and 120mm mortar rounds. Errors included faulty fuses, low-quality firing pins, weak propellant, low-grade explosives and cheap packing materials that let in the damp.

Ukrainian military journalist Yury Butusov, the reporter that first broke the news, on Nov. 6 posting a video that he said had been recorded by a front-line Ukrainian mortar operator complaining of low-quality ammunition that was endangering the user at times.

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Images showed a mortar tube with a live round stuck halfway out the muzzle because, the mortarman said, the propellent had failed to ignite. He said that in some ammunition batches nine out of ten rounds that he managed to fire don’t detonate because of faulty fuses.

Propelling charges are factory-packed in thin cellophane sleeves permeable to water, making the charges too damp to ignite properly. Partial ignition of firing charges can result in a mortar round dropping to ground only several meters in front of the firing crew and if it detonates then they, rather than the Russians, could be hit by shrapnel, the soldier said.

Ukrainian mainstream media and military analysts also said Ukrainian mortar rounds sent to the field often did not work. Two drone operators contacted by Kyiv Post said that in dry conditions fire correction observers considered if one mortar round out of four actually detonated on target as an excellent performance.

Some front-line gunners were attempting to work around the damp propellent problem by removing it from cellophane packing and laying it out on a warm surface. The hack is difficult in Ukraine’s often water-logged front-line trench conditions, and propellent charges that do dry out become an explosive hazard to troops nearby, news reports said.

A relatively cheap munition fired from an easy to operate light tube mortars are used by both sides to hit dismounted attacking infantry. Since late 2023 the Russian army has relied on attacks on foot to avoid heavy losses of tanks and other armored vehicles to Ukrainian drone swarms, and to take advantage of Ukraine’s mortar shortages.

A news piece filed by TSN television special correspondent Yuliya Kiriyenko on Nov. 23 showed video of a recently fired 120mm mortar, still smoking, with a round stuck halfway out of the barrel in the Kurakhive sector, the focal point of Russia’s ground offensive in Ukraine’s east.

“This is a video from Kurakhiv Oblast. It's hot there. And it's bullsh*t. Because it's nothing but sabotage against the Armed Forces. From our manufacturers and the Ministry of Defense. Many people have seen the video with the burning mortar. And I have a few more of them. From every area of the front. From Pokrovsk sector, from the Kurakhiv sector. These are just batches of low-quality 120 mm mortar rounds,” Kiriyenko reported.

Ukrainian military analyst Oleksandr Kochetkov in Nov. 23 Facebook comments said that the state agency responsible for most war production, the Ministry of Strategic Industry, has to date only delivered 18 percent of 120mm mortar rounds it has already been fully paid for, and that 10 percent of those that were delivered were rejected by the military as too poor quality to attempt to use in combat.

“Some do not explode after firing, or, even worse, can explode in the barrel of the mortar. And the media writes about this. Let me remind you that the vast majority of the enemy's manpower on the front line is destroyed precisely by artillery and mortar fire,” Kochetkov said.

According to Kochetkov, unreliable mortar bombs manufactured in country are undermining troop morale and wasting scarce logistics resources which transport bad mortar round lots to troops and then having to return them to the manufacturing facilities.

“What is this, if not negligence, which is tantamount to sabotage?” he said.

Kochetkov and other news reports pointed the finger of blame at the state-run company Ukroboronprom, the government institution responsible for overseeing manufacturing and ensuring quality of military materials produced domestically for the armed forces. The company had not responded to a Kyiv Post request for comment by the time this article was published.

Screenshot from Yury Butusov’s video showing a 120mm mortar round misfiring, catching fire and about to land a few meters from the mortar tube and the crew that fired it.

Butusov in a Nov. 25 update said that AFU leadership had “finally” acknowledged the quality problems and ordered the recall of 100,000 rounds that were issued to seven combat brigades. It was not clear whether those recalled lots were the total of the faulty rounds of the hundreds of thousands of munitions issued to troops. In total, Ukrainian manufacturers received taxpayer funding equivalent to $600 million for the delivery of around 1.9 million mortar rounds in 2024, he said.

Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal claimed in early October that national ammunition manufacturing had been a great success and claimed that since Russia’s February 2022 invasion domestic producers had gone from manufacturing a tiny fraction of all mortar rounds and artillery shells fired on the front, to the production of every second munition fired at the enemy. An October 2024 UNIAN report put the total number of domestically produced artillery shells and mortar rounds contracted for by the government for 2024 at around 2.5 million individual munitions.