KURAKHOVE, Ukraine — Before driving into battle in their mud-spattered war machine, a T-64 tank, the three-man Ukrainian crew performs a ritual.
The commanding officer, Pvt. Dmytro Hrebenok, recites the Lord's Prayer.
The men then walk around the tank, stroking its thick green armor.
A general view shows a building damaged by a Russian military attack, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in the frontline town of Vuhledar, Ukraine February 22, 2023. REUTERS/Alex Babenko
“We say, 'Please don't let us down in battle,'” said Sgt.
Artyom Knignitsky, the mechanic.
“'Bring us in and get us out.'”
His respect for his tank is understandable.
Perhaps no weapon symbolizes the ferocious violence of war more than the main battle tank.
Tanks have loomed over the conflict in Ukraine in recent months, militarily and diplomatically, as both sides prepared for offensives.
Russia pulled stockpiles of tanks from Cold War-era storage, and Ukraine urged Western governments to supply American
Abrams and German Leopard 2 tanks.
The sophisticated western tanks are expected to be on the battlefield in the coming months.
The new Russian armor appeared earlier, and in its first full-scale deployment, it was decimated.
A three-week battle on a plain near the southern Ukrainian coal mining town of Vuhledar produced what Ukrainian authorities say was the biggest tank battle of the war so far and a heavy setback for the Russians.
In the protracted battle, both sides sent tanks into the fray, rumbling over dirt roads and maneuvering around tree lines, with the Russians advancing in columns and the Ukrainians maneuvering defensively, firing from a distance or from hiding when the columns Russians entered their territory.
monuments.
By the time it was over, Russia had not only failed to capture Vuhledar, but had also made the same mistake that cost Moscow hundreds of tanks earlier in the war: advancing columns into ambushes.
Exploded by mines, hit by artillery or destroyed by anti-tank missiles, the charred hulks of Russian armored vehicles now litter agricultural fields across Vuhledar, according to Ukrainian military drone footage.
Ukraine's military said Russia had lost at least 130 tanks and armored personnel carriers in the battle.
That figure could not be independently verified.
Ukraine does not disclose how many weapons it loses.
“We studied the roads they used, then we hid and waited” to fire from ambushes, Knignitsky said.
Lack of experience also plagued the Russians.
Losses
Many of his more elite units had been left in shambles from earlier fighting.
Their places were full of newly recruited soldiers, ignorant of Ukrainian tactics to ambush columns.
In a sign that Russia is running out of experienced tank commanders, Ukrainian soldiers said they captured a medic who had been reassigned to operate a tank.
The Russian military has focused on, and even mythologized, tank warfare for decades because of its recollection of Russian victories over the Nazis in World War II.
Factories in the Ural Mountains have produced tanks by the thousands.
At Vuhledar last week, Russia had lost so many machines to sustain armored attacks that it had switched tactics and resorted only to infantry attacks, Ukrainian commanders said.
The depth of Russia's defeat was underscored by Russian military bloggers, who have become an influential pro-war voice in the country.
Often critical of the military, they have published angry tirades about the failures of repeated tank attacks,
blaming the generals
for misguided tactics with a historic Russian weapon.
Gray Zone, a Telegram channel affiliated with the
Wagner mercenary group,
posted on Monday that “the relatives of the dead are almost inclined to murder and blood revenge against the general” in charge of the assaults near Vuhledar.
In a detailed interview last week in an abandoned house near the front lines, Lieutenant Vladislav Bayak, deputy commander of the Ukrainian 1st Mechanized Battalion of the 72nd Brigade, described how Ukrainian soldiers were able to inflict such heavy losses on what the Commanders said it was the biggest tank battle of the war so far.
Ambushing has been Ukraine's signature tactic against Russian armored columns since the early days of the war.
Working from a bunker in Vuhledar, Bayak saw the first column of about 15 tanks and armored personnel carriers approaching on drone video.
“We were ready,” he said.
"We knew something like this would happen."
A kill zone had been prepared up ahead along a dirt road where tanks were roaring down.
The commander only needed to give an order by radio:
"To the battle!"
Bayak said.
Anti-tank teams hidden in tree lines along the fields, and armed with American infrared-guided javelins and Ukrainian laser-guided Stugna-P missiles, boosted their weapons.
Farther away, the artillery batteries were ready.
The dirt road had been left free of mines, while the surrounding fields were strewn with them, to lure the Russians forward and prevent the tanks from turning around once the trap was set.
The tank column becomes more vulnerable, Bayak said, after the firing begins and the drivers panic and try to turn around, driving onto the mine-ridden shoulder of the road.
The flown vehicles then act as impediments, slowing down or stopping the column.
At that moment, the Ukrainian artillery opens fire, destroying more armor and killing the soldiers coming out of the disabled machines.
A scene of chaos and explosions ensues, Bayak said.
Russian commanders have sent armored columns for lack of other options against well-fortified Ukrainian positions, costly as the tactic was, he said.
For about three weeks of the tank battle, repeated Russian armored assaults failed.
In one case, Ukrainian commanders called in a HIMARS guided rocket attack;
they are typically used on stationary targets such as ammunition dumps or barracks, but they also proved effective against a stationary tank column.
The Ukrainians also fired with American M777 and French Caesar howitzers, as well as other Western-supplied weapons such as javelins.
The Ukrainian tank crew who prayed before each battle nicknamed their tank The Wanderer, after its wandering movements across the battlefield.
Between missions, he remained hidden in the trees under a camouflage net, next to a beaten road in a landscape of mud from passing tanks, about 5 miles from the front line.
During the battle for Vuhledar, Hrebenok, the commander, was ordered to advance from that location on dangerous missions three or four times a day.
Hrebenok, just 20 years old, had no formal training in tank combat when the war began.
But in the hectic early days of the war he was assigned to a tank, and has fought continuously in them ever since, learning tricks along the way.
Training
Training is still a problem.
Ukraine is also losing skilled soldiers and replacing them with green recruits.
And many Ukrainian tank crews are being trained in Western tanks in countries like Germany and Britain.
“All my knowledge I got in the field,” he said.
Russian tank crews, he said, are by contrast mostly fresh recruits without the benefit of any combat to season them.
In ambushes, the crew hides the tank within range of a road that Russian tanks or armored personnel carriers could travel on.
Then wait in silence.
As they sit down and prepare for the ambush, they need to keep the engine warm, because restarting it would take too long.
The ignition would be noisy.
Instead they burn a small kerosene heater next to the engine.
Once, while they waited, a Russian armored personnel carrier passed through their sight and they fired but narrowly missed, damaging but not destroying the machine.
In the last major confrontation, a week ago, the order came during the gray dawn to set up an ambush for a column of 16 Russian tanks and armored vehicles advancing towards the Ukrainian lines.
The crew said their prayer, patted their tank, and moved on.
“We hid the tank in a tree line and waited for them,” Hrebenok said.
"It's always scary, but we have to destroy them."
In this case, they stopped about 3 miles from the ambush site, just out of return fire range, and fired in coordination with a drone pilot who radioed for coordinates for targets they couldn't see directly.
The Russian column stopped at the mines and, Hrebenok said, The Wanderer opened fire.
Russian tank crews had little chance once they were in the kill zone, he said.
“We destroyed a large amount of Russian equipment,” he said.
"What they did wrong was to come to Ukraine."
c.2023 The New York Times Company
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