M1989 Koksan

North Korea's monster gun — the M1989 Koksan is a 170mm self-propelled gun, the largest-caliber tube artillery in service anywhere, designed in the 1970s to range Seoul from behind the DMZ. It became a Ukraine-war weapon in late 2024, when trainloads were geolocated rolling west across Russia: Ukrainian intelligence counts 120 delivered and German reporting up to 200, backfilling Russia's attrited long-range artillery. Since early 2025 Koksans have fired on the Kursk, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia axes — and Ukrainian drones and HIMARS have been methodically picking them off.

Overview

The M1989 Koksan is a North Korean 170mm self-propelled gun — an open, turretless mount on a tracked chassis, known in the DPRK as the Chuch'ep'o ("Juche gun"). "M1989" and "Koksan" are US designations: the year the improved variant was first observed, and the county where the original M1978 was first spotted. Its reason for existing is reach — roughly 40 km with conventional shells and 50–60 km with rocket-assisted projectiles, enough to strike Seoul from north of the DMZ, at the price of a very slow rate of fire (independent estimates: one to two rounds every five minutes). For decades it was a Korean-peninsula curiosity with one foreign combat record, Iran's use of exported M1978s in the Iran–Iraq War. That changed in November 2024, when OSINT analysts geolocated M1989s on Russian trains: the Koksan became the tube-artillery chapter of North Korea's arms pipeline to Moscow — after the shells and the KN-23 ballistic missiles — replacing losses in Russia's own long-range gun park, where the comparable 2S7 Pion/Malka fleet had been ground down. It is now the flagship case of DPRK hardware fighting, and dying, in Ukraine.

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