2024-04-18 02:02:54
So when a Russian tank rolled toward the front lines in recent weeks with a giant new suppressor — a cluster of multiple suppressors, in fact — Ukraine’s drone operators were intrigued. Very, very interested, Forbes writes.
Because if the new suppressors really work, Ukrainian operators need to develop countermeasures.
An opportunity to find out came earlier this month, when a suppressor-laden Russian T-72 became entangled in barbed wire east of Ukrainian positions in Terny, in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region. The wire prevented the tank driver from colliding with the BMP combat vehicle.
Soon, a Ukrainian drone arrived and exploded. The drone did little damage to the 51-ton tank, but it did scare the three crew members. They tried to run – but then they were killed by even more drones that showed up.
Ukrainian intelligence drones were buzzing overhead all the time. After examining the images, analysts concluded that a lightly damaged T-72 with tangled tracks and a stack of radio jammers was the perfect prize.
The 12th Azov Brigade – one of the elite units of the Ukrainian army – volunteered to take part in a mission that was truly extremely dangerous. The goal is to extract the stationary T-72 from the no-man’s land behind Terni, a shelling strip that is probably one of the most dangerous in the world right now.
“We all started planning this operation together,” said Ilya, a tanker from the 12th brigade, in the official video describing the operation. The big unanswered question was: would the tank be able to move at all? Who can tell if his engine is running or not? That was the main question.”
Everyone understood the danger. And when the commander of the company of the 12th brigade ordered the tanker Baidar to contribute to the operation, he just shrugged his shoulders. “It’s normal for me,” says Baidar. “I’m in the army. And I received the order.”
The first to leave were the military engineers who rushed out secretly at night to investigate the approach and check the condition of the tank. They returned to the Ukrainian lines a kilometer away with bad news. Although the tank appeared to be serviceable, its turret was locked in the forward position and the 125mm main gun was blocking the driver’s hatch.
There was no way to get inside through the hatch without first rotating the turret, a job that had to be done by a trained tank crewman.
On the second night, together with a group of soldiers, a tankman also went to the tank. While the engineers painstakingly unhooked the wire encircling the tank’s tracks – a job complicated by a 21kg anti-tank mine sticking out of the ground just below the tank – the tankerman manually rotated the turret to release the driver’s hatch and switched on the tank’s power.
Nothing. “No signs of life,” Baidar recalls. In their haste to escape, the Russian crew left the systems on and drained the tank’s batteries. “It would have been impossible to start it that day,” Ilya recalls.
The next night the soldiers returned again. The engineers were in the lead, the infantrymen accompanied them, and the medics waited in the rear. Baidar and Ilya are in the main squad. The Ukrainians were hauling three batteries, each weighing about 70 kilograms, as well as compressed air, tools and night vision goggles. Compressed air was supposed to help start the tank.
Russian artillery shells exploded nearby, and the tankers worked under the cover of darkness. “In short, I put those batteries in,” Ilya recalls. “I really hoped he would come back to life.”
And so it was. The tank started. Now the hard part: driving it a kilometer back to the Ukrainian positions, avoiding Russian fire. “We gathered all the things, threw them on top and crossing my fingers, I thought: well, let’s go,” says Ilja. He was driving.
It was a clear, moonlit night. Using his night vision goggles, Ilya effortlessly drove through no man’s land to the ruins of Terni. “But when I entered the village, very deep potholes started. Really, really deep. The tank was jumping. It was hard for me to see,” the tanker driver recalls.
Ilya did not notice the deep crater, apparently left by a Russian flying bomb, which had almost swallowed the T-72. “I ran into this hole at high speed,” Ilya recalls. “I hit my head on the hatch and lost consciousness.”
Repentant, the soldier became concerned that he had failed in his mission. Hovering bomb craters are deep and full of mud that can permanently trap a 51-ton tank. Fortunately for the Ukrainians, the main gun of the intercepted T-72 stuck into the ground like a toothpick and prevented the war machine from sinking all the way to the hull.
Ilya engaged the reverse gear and increased the engine speed to 2000 revolutions per minute. “I jerked the tank back, then on the brakes, then upped the revs again, but now I was in second gear, not first, to make the fastest possible jump forward and push out even more.”
Rocking back and forth at maximum revs, Ilya finally steered the tank out of the bomb crater. Ilya was bleeding from injuries sustained when he fell into the crater and periodically lost consciousness – but still managed to get the tank through dozens of other craters.
After finally reaching their defenses safely, the Ukrainians began investigating the electronic jamming systems that put lives at risk.
“It was a self-made system,” says Ilja. The individual suppressors and their antennas may have been factory standard, but the overall assembly – several suppressors strapped to a wooden shipping pallet – was “homemade” and probably not always effective.
“Why did they do it at all?” – Ilya still wonders. “It’s very uncomfortable.”
But it’s good news for Ukraine’s drone campaign: good news that cost Ukrainian soldiers three nights of hardship and tension, driving through mines, shelling and tank-threatening craters, writes Forbes.
2024-04-18 02:02:54