A Ukrainian vehicle crew said it used an Italian B1 Centauro to strike a house nearly seven miles away, one of the longest indirect tank gun shots reported in the war.
“The furthest shot I had was from a closed position. It was 11 kilometers. At 11,100 meters, I hit a building directly where they were sitting,” the crew’s gunner from the 78th Separate Air Assault Brigade told Army TV, a Ukrainian channel run by the defense ministry.
A closed position means that the crew is essentially operating the tank gun as they would with artillery — firing from a concealed location at a target outside line of sight.
A distance of 11,100 meters is about 6.9 miles, or about 121 football fields.
The gunner, identified by the call sign “Khilya,” was part of a crew demonstrating the B1 Centauro, an 8×8 vehicle with lighter armor compared to a typical main battle tank but a powerful NATO-standard 105-mm cannon.
Other Ukrainian gunners have claimed successful hits from similar distances with a tank gun before. One of the best-known accounts of such a shot was in 2022, when a Ukrainian T-64BV crew said it struck a Russian tank that was 10,600 meters, or about 6.5 miles, away.
The practice of using tank guns as artillery has become more commonplace in Ukraine as drones saturate the battlefield, which can more easily target an armored vehicle’s weak spots and make it nearly impossible for a crew to approach enemy positions unscathed.
“At the moment, to go tank-to-tank, you have to first get through a large number of FPV drones and all kinds of Molniya drones. That’s difficult. But from closed positions, this fires very accurately,” said the B1 Centauro’s commander, identified by the call sign “Director.”
FPV drones are first-person-view drones, while Molniyas are fixed-wing, one-way attack drones often used on the front lines.
The B1 Centauro demonstrated by the crew was fitted with anti-drone metal cages on its chassis, along with a separate cage and netting that formed a hood behind the vehicle’s gun turret.
These wheeled tank destroyers, mostly produced in the 1990s, were first reported to have been sent to Ukraine in 2023. They were first seen in publicly released footage in late 2025, operating under the 78th.
The Italian vehicle can fire its gun upward at an angle of about 15 degrees, while typical self-propelled howitzers or similar artillery can often point theirs about 60 to 70 degrees skyward.
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