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The $10 million Western main battle tanks that Ukraine once intensely lobbied its allies to secure have been pushed out of active frontline assaults by cheap drones, according to a report published on August 25 by The New York Times.
According to the report, the tanks assigned to Ukraine’s 33rd Separate Mechanized Brigade now spend most of their time parked in hidden forest clearings, collecting cobwebs under protective camouflage netting.
Western tank deliveries began taking shape in early 2023, led by Britain’s pledge of 14 Challenger 2 tanks, followed by Germany authorizing Leopard 2 transfers alongside coalition partners including Poland, Denmark, and the Netherlands. The first German-made Leopard 2s arrived in Ukraine in early 2023, while the United States completed its delivery of 31 M1 Abrams main battle tanks by October 2023, supplemented by refurbished Leopard 1 models.
Despite high expectations that the heavy armor would spearhead offensive maneuvers, the proliferation of cheap drones altered the nature of the fight, the Times reported.
Ukrainian commanders told the newspaper that armor operations have become nearly impossible to execute without immediate detection, forcing both sides to curtail heavy armored assaults.
“We’re making virtually no use of armored vehicles,” Oleksandr Syrskyi, who until last month served as Ukraine’s top general, told the Times, questioning how forces might neutralize the advantage enjoyed by drones.
According to the report, Ukrainian soldiers continue maintaining the tanks through routine drills while welding on protective metal cages and explosive reactive armor panels to counter drone impacts.
With frontline combat engagements largely paused, crews told the newspaper they predominantly use the multi-ton behemoths under cover of bad weather to tow damaged equipment out of fire zones.
Faced with the changing dynamics, many tank operators and recruits reported shifting their focus to retraining on ground and aerial drones.
While the Times report focused on how drone warfare forced Ukraine to park its Western-made tanks, it largely glossed over the scale of combat destruction inflicted on these armors by the Russian military.
Combat tracking data shows that Russian troops have inflicted devastating combat losses on Western-made tanks through dense minefields, heavy artillery strikes, anti-tank missiles, and drone strikes — destroying, damaging, or capturing dozens of German Leopard 2s, the vast majority of the U.S.-supplied M1 Abrams fleet, and multiple British Challenger 2 tanks before they were withdrawn from frontline duty.
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ukraine may a have new wonder plan. using obsolete nato scrap metal as dragons teeth to slow russian advances. why is cia director radcliff is visitng moscow today ?
how does this compare with over ten thousand pieces of war machinery lost by russia in over 4 and a half years? you don’t need tanks to hold a defensive line in a modern drone warfare but no modern war has been won without tanks in the last century. as long as russian armor continues to explode every day, ukraine is doing well on the battlefield
a rússia tem drones ultra sofisticados e modernos e inteligentes seu babaca
usa and nato are laughing at midget poohtin!
sure they are, just like jews were laughing as they were cooked. go back to your ww2 nintendo games.
only in public.
war and the weapons is always changing. in the medieval era the armoured knight was the tank of its day, and then the long bow was developed and that signalled the beginning of the end, and infantry started to be dominant, same with castles, and then gunpowder came from china, and cannon were invented, and the castle once the domain for centuries became vulnerable, and now it is the 110 year old ‘tank’ that as we know it that is at risk to the new military weapon of the drone.