Battling A T-90 Tank, A Ukrainian M-2 Ran Out Of Armor-Piercing Ammo

When a pair of Ukrainian M-2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles recently tag-teamed a Russian T-90 tank in Stepove, outside Avdiivka in northeastern Ukraine—ultimately disabling the more heavily-armed and -armored tank—the skirmish nearly ended in disaster for the Ukrainian crews.

One of the 30-ton Bradleys—assigned to the Ukrainian army’s 47th Mechanized Brigade—got off a few rounds with its 25-millimeter auto-cannon before breaking off and speeding away, leaving a second Bradley to press the attack at a range of just a few tens of yards.

The three-person crew of the second M-2—nearly 200 of which the United States donated to Ukraine last year—opened fire with 25-millimeter armor-piercing rounds. And that’s when near-disaster struck.

What follows is the testimony of the M-2’s crew, reported by Ukrainian T.V. program TCH and translated by @wartranslated. “We fired with all we could,” Serhiy, the gunner, told TCH. “At first with anti-armor. And then we started having issues.”

It’s not clear what those issues were. Perhaps the crew ran out of armor-piercing rounds. In any event, it had to switch to other, less-powerful ammunition—likely high-explosive rounds.

The hits Serhiy scored with armor-piercing ammo had not yet penetrated the T-90’s add-on reactive armor, to say nothing of piercing its hundreds of millimeters of composite base armor.

It’s that armor, plus a T-90’s 125-millimeter smoothbore main gun, that makes the tank more than a match for an M-2 with its smaller gun and much thinner armor, all things being equal.

All things were not equal in Stepove that day. Despite having completed his training in Germany just a few weeks prior to the fight with the T-90, Serhiy adapted fast. “I remembered everything,” he said, comparing operating an M-2 to playing video games.

Unable to penetrate the 51-ton T-90, Serhiy targeted the tank’s fragile optics. “I started blinding him so he couldn’t leave.”

Dramatic drone videos of the skirmish depict what happened next. Hammering the T-90 with one-pound autocannon rounds, Serhiy triggered some of the tank’s explosive reactive armor and destroyed the optics.

Its turret spinning, the tank rolled out of control—and into a tree. The three crew bailed out. One, the driver, reportedly got captured. Later, a Ukrainian first-person-view drone finished off the T-90. Its wreck still was on the battlefield days later.

Serhiy’s clever tactics belie how difficult it is for an IFV
IFV
—even one as balanced as the M-2 is—to take out a tank in a close fight. But his tactics also underscore that, in any hard fight, skill matters as much as equipment does.