2023-12-12 18:24:00
PrintShare
A drone video shows one of the rare tank-on-tank battles in Ukraine. Ukraine’s most famous tank brigade is probably involved.
Kiev – Tank battles are rarer in the Ukrainian war than one might think. In Ukraine, tanks typically carry out infantry attacks against enemy trenches or fire their guns at enemy positions miles away. Recently, however, a rare tank-on-tank battle occurred in eastern Ukraine, somewhere north of Avdiivka. This was reported by the experienced military blogger David Ax for US magazine Forbes.
Ax refers to a video from the front that a Ukrainian drone took. It shows two tanks, a Ukrainian T-64 and a Russian T-72B3, rolling towards each other. The two Soviet-designed models fire several shots through the treetops from their largely identical 125-millimeter main guns. Then the Russian tank raises smoke and retreats. A Ukrainian drone loaded with explosives tracks the retreating T-72 and hits it, apparently blocking its turret.
Legendary tank brigade of the Ukrainian Army in the Ukrainian War
This tank-on-tank battle is also notable because it may be the Ukrainian Army’s 1st Tank Brigade, Ax said. It is the most experienced of Ukraine’s five armored brigades. In the first weeks of the war, this brigade defended the large city of Chernihiv in the north of the country, almost 100 kilometers north of Kiev, from the Russian invaders. Their upgraded T-64BV tanks were lurking in the forests surrounding the city and attacking Russian columns at close range.
Tanks, drones, air defense: weapons for Ukraine
View photo series
“Better crew training, combined with short-range operations where armament was competitive, and the T-64’s faster self-loader enabled Ukrainian tank crews to inflict significant damage against surprised Russian units,” military analysts concluded in a study the Royal United Services Institute in London about the deployment of the 1st Armored Brigade at that time.
The six-week defense of Chernihiv, although successful, was costly for the 1st Armored Brigade. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky awarded the unit’s 2,000 soldiers a thousand battlefield awards. After Ukrainian counterattacks drove the Russian invasion army out of northern Ukraine in March and April 2022, the brigade withdrew for a longer period of rest and recovery.
Armored brigade may prefer older tanks to Western models in Ukraine war
A few months later, in the summer of 2022, the tanks of the 1st Brigade rolled into their next combat mission, this time in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine. The brigade has been fighting in the east for 18 months now, repeatedly deploying its battalions to repel Russian attacks and support Ukrainian counterattacks. The front in the East has become the epicenter of the war. Russia is mercilessly burning thousands of soldiers to capture the small town of Avdiivka, which has been converted into a veritable Ukrainian fortress.
The tank from the quoted video could have already been involved in the defense of Chernihiv. If so, it would be proof that Ukraine’s best armored brigade is still using the older tanks – after all, Kiev has received hundreds of modern Western-design tanks from its foreign allies – German Leopard 1 and 2, British Challenger 2 , American M-1. The latter in particular are not said to be doing particularly well on the Ukrainian battlefield.
A T-64BV main battle tank pictured on the grounds of the Kharkiv Tank Plant in northeastern Ukraine. © Vyacheslav Madiyevskyi via www.imago-images.de
T-64BV – not the best, but not the worst tanks in Ukraine either
The 1st Armored Brigade pulled loudly Forbes in February 2022 with around 100 T-64s in the war against the aggressor Russia. They were mostly upgraded T-64BV Obr, built in 2017, equipped with modern optics, satellite navigation and new radio systems. Ukraine’s Kharkiv Tank Plant, in close cooperation with partners in the Czech Republic, has since begun converting potentially hundreds of T-64BVs to the newer Obr.2022 format. This standard includes further improvements to optics and radio systems.
Currently, the 1st Armored Brigade deploys a mix of different T-64BV models, including at least some of the original pre-2017 models that lack the improved optics and digital systems, writes Forbes. The 42-ton T-64, designed for three people, are certainly not the worst tanks in the Ukrainian inventory – not as long as the older T-62s have been in use.
They are also not the best tanks in Ukraine. But it is the tanks that the 1st Armored Brigade works with and for which its logistics and tactics have been developed. And they are quite capable of at least keeping up with newer T-72B3s in tank-on-tank battles, as the drone video shows.
1702406146
#Rare #tank #battle #video #shows #Ukraine #brigade #fight #Russia