Nearly two years into Russia’s wider war on Ukraine, the Ukrainian army’s 4th Tank Brigade has settled on a pair of T-72 models as the main equipment for its four tank battalions, each of which has around 30 tanks.
Some of the battalions have T-72AMTs: T-72As from the late 1970s that Ukraine extensively upgraded in the 1990s. Others have T-72M1s, which are T-72As the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact countries improved with additional armor.
Poland and the Czech Republic both manufactured the T-72M1 under license, and each has pledged scores of the 45-ton, three-person tanks to the Ukrainian war effort. Altogether, Ukraine has gotten—or soon should get—more than 400 T-72s of all models from its foreign allies.
But that doesn’t mean the Ukrainian armed forces have enough T-72s. As losses of the best Western-style tanks—Leopard 2s, especially—pile up, it’s looking increasingly likely that Kyiv will need hundreds more T-72s to replace the 500 or so tanks it has lost while also equipping new brigades.
Which helps to explain why the 4th Tank Brigade went to extraordinary lengths to kluge together a unique T-72 from the wreckage of no fewer than three different tank models. This Frankenstein’s monster of a tank underscores Ukraine’s escalating tank crisis.
In addition to receiving hundreds of T-72s from its allies, Ukraine also has captured from Russia hundreds of T-72s as well as hundreds of T-90s, T-80s and T-62s. Many of these tanks took damage before their crews abandoned them or died inside of them.
Never ones to waste a vehicle, the Ukrainians some time before this spring identified three partially wrecked ex-Russian tanks that, added together, still made one functional tank. A T-72B1 had a working turret but a damaged hull. A T-72B3 had an intact hull but was missing a road wheel. An obsolete T-62 had wheels to spare.
Technicians combined the wrecks, and produced a one-off tank with the turret of a T-72B1, the hull of a T-72B3 and a single T-62 road wheel. This Frankentank appeared on the front line in March, and again this month with the 4th Tank Brigade, which has split its battalions between southern and eastern Ukraine.
The Frankentank in essence is a T-72B1 with that variant’s aging fire-controls and 2A46M 125-millimeter main gun, but with a B3’s uprated 860-horsepower diesel engine in place of the B1’s less powerful 780-horsepower diesel.
It’s ugly and weird and probably less capable than the 4th Brigade’s best T-72AMTs, but more capable than its T-72M1s. In any event, the awkward Frankentank speaks to Ukraine’s desperate need for more and better armored fighting vehicles as the wider war grinds toward its third year.
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