Russia will soon deploy its latest howitzers in the Northern Military District, which borders Finland and Norway, the head of the state defense conglomerate Rostec said, Reuters reports.

Testing of the new Koalitsiya-SV self-propelled artillery installations has been completed, and their serial production has already begun, said the head of Rostec Serhii Chemezov in an interview with the state news agency RIA, News.ro reports.

According to him, the first experimental batch will be delivered by the end of 2023.

“I think they will appear there (in the Northern Military District) in the near future, because howitzers of this class are needed to ensure superiority over Western models of artillery in terms of firing range,” Chemezov said.

In 2021, Russian President Vladimir Putin changed the status of the Russian Northern Fleet, whose area of ​​responsibility was mainly the Russian Arctic, to the Northern Military District, including the Murmansk Region, which shares borders with Finland and Norway.

After launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Moscow accused the “collective West” of waging a proxy war with Russia and warned that Moscow would build up its forces on its western borders after Finland joins the US-led NATO alliance.

At the beginning of December, the Russian state news agency TASS reported that the howitzer of the SV-Coalition had already been thrown to the front line in Ukraine.

Howitzers with a firing range of up to 70 kilometers are equipped with a modern 2A88 caliber 152 mm cannon, a rate of fire of more than 10 rounds per minute, as well as a modern system for automating the processes of aiming weapons and selecting targets. and navigation, TASS reports.