The Ukrainian army is down one more Leopard 2 tank after a Russian missile ambush knocked out a Strv 122—a Swedish variant of the Leopard 2A5—during an attack by the Ukrainian army’s 21st Mechanized Brigade on Russian positions in Orlyanske, in eastern Ukraine, on or just before Monday.
That makes six Leopard 2 losses in just a week or so. Add the six Leopard 2s the Russians destroyed before last week, and the Ukrainians have written off a dozen of the German-made tanks—out of 71 Ukraine’s NATO allies so far have donated to the war effort.
The Ukrainians, in other words, are down nearly a fifth of their Leopard 2s. Germany has pledged an additional 14 Leopard 2A4s that should arrive next year. These replacement tanks can’t come soon enough: the Russians are knocking out Leopard 2s at an accelerating rate.
The Strv 122 kill bucked recent trends. Where most Leopard 2 losses have resulted from the one-two blows of mines and explosives-laden drones, the Strv 122 fell victim to a skilled team firing a heavy anti-tank missile, perhaps a 60-pound Kornet.
The missile ambush targeted a pair of Strv 122s attacking toward Orlyanske, at the border of Kharkiv and Luhansk Oblasts, in broad daylight. A Russian drone spotted the tanks and the missile team took aim.
As the drone observed from overhead, a missile struck the 69-ton, four-person Strv 122 on the rear of its turret, where the tank stores much of the ammunition for its 120-millimeter main gun.
The ammo is in a special compartment that’s got armor on the inside door but whose outside panels are more fragile. That way, if the ammo takes a hit and cooks off, the resulting explosion blows outward through the panels instead of inward into the turret.
These blow-out panels, which are standard on most Western tank types but not on Russian tanks, are the reason the crews of Western tanks tend to survive direct hits on their vehicles. Their absence is why the crews of Russian tanks tend not to survive.
Indeed, the drone that observed the missile strike on the Strv 122 also observed the four crew escaping down the same road they’d been attacking down.
The Strv 122 may be a total loss—and possibly the first total loss of the type in Ukrainian service. The 21st Mechanized Brigade operates—or operated—all 10 Strv 122s that Sweden donated to Ukraine earlier this year.
The brigade mostly has been fighting a defensive effort against a limited Russian countercounteroffensive in and around the Kreminna Forest—an operation the Kremlin clearly hoped might spoil Ukraine’s own counteroffensive in the south and east, which kicked off in early June and has seen Ukrainian brigades advance along several critical axes.
But the 21st Brigade’s defensive fight has included local counterattacks such as the one involving those Strv 122s this week. The brigade’s tank company previously ran into trouble last month, when a pair of its ex-Swedish tanks ran over mines then ate a few explosive drones.
Engineers recovered at least one, and possibly both, of those Strv 122s. When Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky arrived at the 21st Brigade’s rear area for a brief visit on Oct. 3, one of the damaged Strv 122s was there. Photos of the visit revealed the tank’s damage largely to be superficial.
That should come as no surprise. To produce a Strv 122 from a stock Leopard 2A5, the Swedes added layers of composite armor to the tank’s turret. That armor should help a Strv 122 survive strikes by small drones, whose explosive payload might weigh just a pound or two.
An anti-tank guided missile by comparison is much heavier. A Kornet missile’s 10-pound warhead can punch through more than a thousand millimeters of armor from thousands of yards away. Even a Strv 122, one of the best-protected tanks in the world, can’t just shrug off an ATGM the way it might a flurry of tiny drones.
The total loss of a Strv 122 is a painful blow to the 21st Brigade, which likely has just a single tank company instead of the three companies most Ukrainian mechanized brigades have.
Sweden hasn’t signaled a willingness to donate more Strv 122s—it only ever had 120 of the tanks to begin with—so once the 21st Brigade’s 10 Strv 122s are gone, the unit will have to switch to a different tank type. One that almost certainly will offer less protection to its crew than the Strv 122 does.
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