In April 2022, just two months after Russia widened its war on Ukraine, Slovenia pledged to the Ukrainian war effort all of its old M-55S tanks. Well, all of them that weren’t in a museum: 28 copies.
Nearly two years later, the Ukrainian army still is struggling to find a place for the hybrid tanks, which combine the hulls and turrets of 1950s-vintage, Soviet-made T-55 tanks with modern Israeli fire-controls and a classic L7 105-millimeter main gun from the United Kingdom.
The M-55S isn’t a bad tank—it has better fire-controls than most Russian tanks have plus armor that, 200 millimeters thick before the addition of reactive armor blocks, is superior to the armor on Ukraine’s German-made Leopard 1A5 tanks.
But the M-55S is a weird tank. And the Ukrainian army keeps assigning and reassigning the M-55Ss as it struggles to expand its tank corps.
The 36-ton, four-person M-55Ss arrived in late 2022 and, forming one battalion, joined the new 47th Mechanized Brigade. The NATO-style brigade trained with the ex-Slovenian tanks through the fall and winter but, when it came time to deploy to southern Ukraine for Kyiv’s long-planned 2023 counteroffensive, the 47th got an upgrade.
Accurately assessing that the southern front would see some of the heaviest fighting of the war once Ukraine’s counteroffensive corps went on the attack, the general staff in Kyiv assigned to the 47th Brigade the army’s 21 German-made Leopard 2A6 tanks—some of the best-protected tanks of the Russia-Ukraine war—and cascaded the now-orphaned M-55Ss to a less high-priority brigade, apparently the 67th Mechanized.
As the 47th Brigade and the rest of the counteroffensive corps attacked in the south and suffered heavy losses in people and equipment, the 67th Brigade held the line around Kreminna in eastern Ukraine, eventually losing one M-55S apparently to an artillery strike.
The Ukrainian counteroffensive ground to a halt last fall—and the Russian army, sensing weakness and exhaustion in its foe, immediately launched its own offensive. Six months later, the Russians have managed to capture—at tremendous cost—the ruins of Avdiivka, 60 miles south of Kreminna.
Now both armies are exhausted. As the fighting ebbs and the Russians and Ukrainians both scramble to rebuild their forces, the 27 surviving M-55Ss apparently are getting reassigned again.
As seemingly revealed in official photos pointed out by Militaryland, which tracks the Ukrainian order of battle, the M-55Ss apparently have chopped to the new 5th Tank Brigade, which for months has been organizing and training in Kryvyi Rih in the south and which is one of the few intact brigades the Ukrainian army still has in reserve.
While it might seem as though the late-forming 5th Tank Brigade simply is inheriting some other brigade’s castoffs, there’s another explanation for the M-55Ss’ third transfer.
There’s evidence the 5th Tank Brigade also operates some of the roughly 200 40-ton, four-person Leopard 1A5s Ukraine slowly is getting from a Danish-Dutch-German consortium. The Leopard 1A5 has the same L7 gun the M-55S has.
Don’t think of the 5th Tank Brigade as a mixed brigade with, say, one battalion of M-55Ss and two battalions of Leopard 1A5s. Think of it as a brigade with three battalions of mobile L7 guns, all firing the same ammunition.
Sources:
1. 5th Tank Brigade: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100091064940004
2. Ukraine Control Map: https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=180u1IkUjtjpdJWnIC0AxTKSiqK4G6Pez&hl=en_US&ll=48.06091656989883%2C33.404206447079844&z=9
3. Ukraine Weapons Tracker: https://twitter.com/UAWeapons/status/1682710915811033092
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