Anticipating a Ukrainian counteroffensive, Russian troops last fall started digging in along the likeliest axes of advance in southern and eastern Ukraine.
Anticipating that the Russians would anticipate their attack, Ukrainian troops readied a large force of special engineering vehicles whose main mission is to breach enemy defenses.
Among the rarest of these vehicles are the uniquely Ukrainian BMR-64 mineclearing tanks. The small force of BMR-64s has had a hard war. The Russians so far have knocked out or captured at least two of them, including one last week.
Racing to stay ahead of the coming counteroffensive, Russian workers excavated trenches, piled up earthen berms, laid out concrete tank-obstacles and—most importantly—seeded the ground around these fortifications with mines. Thousands of them.
When the counteroffensive finally kicked off more than three weeks ago, those mines quickly proved to be among the most serious impediments to the Ukrainians’ advance. Most notably, a powerful assault by the Ukrainian army’s 33rd and 47th Brigades ended in disaster on June 8 when the brigades rolled into a minefield in southern Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Oblast.
The sheer density of Russian mines means Ukraine’s combat engineers must lead the way. Riding in their specialized vehicles, the engineers try to roll up or plow up just enough mines to clear a lane for tanks and fighting vehicles safely to travel through a minefield.
It’s extremely dangerous work. Minerollers and mineplows don’t always work perfectly. And that explains the extreme losses Ukrainian engineers have suffered in the first few weeks of the counteroffensive.
The 33rd and 47th Brigades’ assault south of Mala Tokmachka cost the 47th Brigade three of its six ex-Finnish Leopard 2R mineclearing vehicles. The assault force also lost one of Ukraine’s 40 or so German-made Wisent mineclearers plus an ex-Soviet BMR-2.
Along other axes of the counteroffensive, the Ukrainians recently have written off several other engineering vehicles with mineclearing capability, including a pair of Soviet-vintage IMR-2s and one of the rare BMR-64s.
A video that circulated online this week depicts a damaged and abandoned BMR-64 in Zaporizhzhia—the victim, it seems, of the very mines its crew apparently was trying to clear.
It’s unclear how many more BMR-64s the Ukrainian army has left after losing one last year and the second this week. The Malyshev Tank Plant in Kharkiv built the first few BMR-64s in 2018. It’s possible the plant since then has completed a few more.
A 40-ton BMR-64 combines the armored hull and turret of a 1970s-vintage T-64A tank with KMT-7 minerollers—and removes the tank’s 125-millimeter gun in order to save weight and shrink the crew from three to two.
Potentially the biggest problem with the BMR-64 is one that’s common to many Soviet-style mineclearing vehicles. The KMT-series minerollers detonate mines in two narrow channels right in front of a vehicles’ tracks. That risks leaving intact mines in the middle of an assault lane.
It’s not for no reason that the leading Western mineclearing device—a plow made by Pearson Engineering in the United Kingdom—is as wide as are the vehicles that carry it.
Expect Ukraine’s combat engineers to lose more engineering vehicles as the counteroffensive rolls into its second month. Don’t expect these losses to halt the counteroffensive. The Ukrainians might run out of Leopard 2Rs and BMR-64s that only ever existed in small numbers, but they still have scores of Wisents, BMRs, IMRs and other engineering vehicles that can mount minerollers or a mineplow.
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