How Ukraine's Tanks Beat Russia's In Rare Recent Battle

Battles between tanks in Ukraine are rare due to fear of drones and artillery. Tanks generally used to lead infantry assaults or to fire obliquely as mobile artillery.

But there have apparently been some tank battles around Avdiivka of late - and the Ukrainians appear to have gotten the best of the Russians due to crew training and faster ammunition auto-loaders. JL 

David Axe reports in Forbes:

A Ukrainian T-64 of its 1st Tank Brigade and a Russian T-72B3 rolled toward each other north of Avdiivka. The two Soviet tanks exchanged rounds from their identical 125-millimeter guns, each shooting and missing until the Russian tank popped smoke and pulled back. An explosives-laden Ukrainian drone chased after the T-72 as it retreated, striking and jamming its turret. “Better crew training combined with short-ranged engagements where their armament was competitive, and the faster autoloader on the T-64, allowed Ukrainian tank crews to achieve significant damage against Russian units.”

As a Ukrainian drone observed from overhead, two tanks—a Ukrainian T-64 and a Russian T-72B3—rolled toward each other, apparently somewhere just north of Avdiivka sometime recently.

Nosing through treelines, the two Soviet-designed tanks exchanged a few rounds from their roughly identical 125-millimeter main guns, each shooting and missing until the Russian tank popped smoke and pulled back.

An explosives-laden Ukrainian drone chased after the T-72 as the tank retreated, striking it and apparently jamming its turret.

The inconclusive tank battle is noteworthy for its rarity: in Ukraine, tanks usually lead infantry assaults against enemy trenches or, even more often, fire their guns at enemy positions from miles away.

It also is noteworthy because it might involve the Ukrainian army’s 1st Tank Brigade—the most experienced of the army’s five tank brigades. The 1st Tank famously defended Chernihiv, in northern Ukraine, during the early weeks of Russia’s wider assault on Ukraine.

Lying in wait in the forests around the city, 60 miles north of Kyiv, the 1st Tank’s upgraded T-64BV tanks engaged passing Russian columns at close range.

“Better crew training combined with short-ranged engagements where their armament was competitive, and the faster autoloader on the T-64, allowed Ukrainian tank crews to achieve significant damage against surprised Russian units,” analysts Mykhaylo Zabrodskyi, Jack Watling, Oleksandr Danylyuk and Nick Reynolds wrote in a study for the Royal United Services Institute in London.

But the six-week defense of Chernihiv, while successful, was costly for the 1st Tank. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky awarded the unit’s 2,000 troopers a thousand battlefield citations.

After counterattacking Ukrainian units pushed the Russian invasion force out of northern Ukraine in March and April 2022, the 1st Tank pulled back for a long period of rest and reset.

The 1st Tank rolled into action again in the summer of 2022, in Donetsk Oblast in eastern Ukraine. For 18 months, the brigade has fought in the east—deploying and redeploying its battalions to blunt Russian attacks and support Ukrainian counterattacks.

As Ukraine’s southern counteroffensive wound down this fall, the Russian army mobilized for what is becoming a new tradition: an early-winter eastern offensive. A multi-brigade Russian force attacked toward Avdiivka, a Ukrainian stronghold just northwest of Donetsk city.

The two-month battle for Avdiivka has been a bloodbath for the Russians. They’ve lost hundreds of vehicles and potentially thousands of people while inflicting far fewer casualties on Avdiivka’s Ukrainian garrison.

But costly Russian “meat assaults” work, as long as Russia doesn’t mind sacrificing thousands of lives and Ukraine does mind. As occurred in Severodonetsk last year and Bakhmut this spring, there may come a time when Ukrainian commanders decide the ruins of Avdiivka aren’t worth holding.

That time is not now. The Ukrainians have reinforced the 110th Mechanized Brigade in Avdiivka with battalions from several other brigades, including the high-tech 47th Mechanized ... and the 1st Tank. That T-64 that battled that Russian tank north of Avdiivka may have come from the storied Chernihiv brigade.

If so, it’s further evidence that, despite Ukraine receiving hundreds of Western-made tanks from its foreign allies—German Leopard 1s and Leopard 2s, British Challenger 2s, American M-1s—Ukraine’s best tank brigade still rides in Ukraine’s older tanks.

The 1st Tank went to war in early 2022 with a hundred or so T-64s, predominantly T-64BV Obr. 2017 models with modern optics, satellite navigations and new radios.

Ukraine’s Kharkiv tank plant, working closely with partners in the Czech Republic, since then has begun updating potentially hundreds of T-64BVs to the newer Obr. 2022 standard with further enhancements to their optics and radios.

The 1st Tank deploys a mix of T-64BVs, including at least a few of the original, pre-2017 models that lack the improved optics and digital systems. The 42-ton, three-person T-64s certainly aren’t the worst tanks in the Ukrainian inventory—not as long as Ukrainian territorials continue using ex-Russian T-62s. They also aren’t the best.

But they’re the tanks the 1st Tank Brigade knows, and for which the brigade has developed logistics and tactics. And they’re fully capable of at least matching newer T-72B3s in tank-on-tank fights.