The VT-72B is an oddity: an armored engineering vehicle based on a T-72 tank, minus its turret and gun, and briefly manufactured in the former Czechoslovakia in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
East Germany acquired a few copies, as did India, but for the most part the VT-72B was Czech—until Czechoslovakia split up in 1993 and the ARVs cascaded to the successor states: the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Neither country’s army still has any of the 46-ton, two-crew engineering vehicles in its active inventory, although the Czech army does operate a handful of newer VT-72Ms.
It’s unclear exactly what the Czechs and Slovaks did with their old VT-72Bs. But somehow copies of the ARV wound up on both sides of Russia’s wider war on Ukraine.
It’s obvious why the Ukrainians and Russians would want the VT-72Bs: both armies are losing tanks and other armored vehicles by the hundreds as the wider war grinds into its 18th month.
It often is possible to repair an immobilized vehicle, but only after engineers recover it from the battlefield—a task that usually first requires an ARV crew to tow the vehicle to safety.
To that end, a diesel-powered VT-72B boasts a winch, a 19-ton crane and a dozer blade for stability. It’s in the same class of vehicle as the German Bergepanzer, British Challenger ARV and American M-88.
Recovering irreplaceable ex-German Leopard 2A6 tanks, ex-Finnish Leopard 2R mineclearers and ex-American M-2 fighting vehicles, Ukrainian Bergepanzers have helped to mitigate the cost of a disastrous attempt by the Ukrainian army’s 47th Brigade to cross a Russian minefield in southern Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Oblast on June 8.
The brigade left behind more than two dozen of its best vehicles. It wasn’t until weeks later that the Ukrainians had advanced far enough past the minefield that the engineers in the Bergepanzers could begin their recovery work.
Both the Czech Republic and Slovakia, as NATO members, are supporters of a free Ukraine and have provided combat vehicles to Kyiv’s army. It seems the Czech Republic supplied a few VT-72Bs to Ukraine around 2014, the year Russia first invaded Ukraine. Some of those ARVs still are in action.
It’s much less clear how Russia got VT-72Bs. The Russian army operates a wide array of recovery vehicles—hundreds of them—based on tank and fighting-vehicle chassis.
It wasn’t widely known that the Russian army had VT-72Bs until one of the aging ARVs appeared alongside some other old combat vehicles on a Russian train, bound for Ukraine, in a video that circulated online on Wednesday.
That the Russians are activating every old ARV they can locate at some Siberian vehicle park should come as no surprise.
Since widening their war on Ukraine in February 2022, the Russians have lost around 300 engineering vehicles that independent analysts can confirm. That’s a lot of engineering vehicles—far more than most armies have in their entire inventories.
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