Russian Pilots Have More To Fear As Ukraine’s Gepard Anti-Aircraft Tanks Arrive

In 1973, the West German army had a problem. Forty-nine years later, the Ukrainian army had the same problem.

That problem: the Russian army and air force’s very-low-flying attack jets and helicopters.

The German and Ukrainian armies also shared a solution to this problem, in the form of a tracked armored vehicle packing a radar and a pair of 35-millimeter guns with fuzed ammunition that explodes in mid-air.

The Gepard. Germany pledged to Ukraine 30 of these self-propelled anti-aircraft guns, or SPAAGs. The first copies began arriving this week. “Our capabilities to protect our sky will be strengthened,” Ukrainian defense minister Oleksii Reznikov tweeted.

The Germans, along with the Belgians and Dutch, once deployed hundreds of Gepards. The plan, in wartime, was for the SPAAGs to accompany tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, protecting them from Russian gunship helicopters and Su-25 attack jets flying underneath the radar horizon of longer-range surface-to-air missile batteries.

Most NATO countries disposed of their Gepards and other SPAAGs as the Russian threat seemed to subside in the early 2000s. One exception is Romania, whose 40 ex-German Gepards now comprise a greater part of NATO’s mobile, short-range air-defenses.

The Russian threat to Ukraine never really subsided—not since Ukraine began moving into the Western sphere following popular protests that prevented a Russia-backed presidential candidate from stealing an election in 2004.

When the Russian army widened its war in Ukraine starting in late February, the same old gunships and Su-25s flew overhead. The Ukrainian army initially lacked adequate air-defenses against low- and close-flying aircraft. It’s not for no reason that, when Kyiv went to its Western allies with a list of weapons it needed, shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles were near the top.

A soldier hauling a 35-pound Stinger SAM is mobile in the sense that he can ride along with the front-line forces. But he has to jump out of his vehicle to shoot a missile. That both slows down his battalion and puts him in the line of fire.

A Gepard by contrast is mobile and protected, as it combines the basic chassis of a Leopard tank with a lightly-armored turret. Its twin Oerlikon cannons fire 550 rounds a minute out to a range of three miles. The three-person crew is cued by a turret-mounted radar with a nine-mile range.

The Gepard is an Su-25-killer. Moreso because Russian doctrine, and the Russian military’s shortage of precision weapons, compels attack pilots to fly very close to enemy forces in order to employ unguided rockets and bombs.

So it was a big deal when, in April, Berlin offered Gepards to Kyiv. Yes, the SPAAGs are old. But so are the aircraft they’re meant to destroy. The Gepard still works just fine. “It’s a ‘golden oldie,’” Nicholas Drummond, a British tank consultant, tweeted in reference to the SPAAG.

The Russian air force already has lost 16 of its roughly 200 Su-25s in five months of hard fighting in Ukraine. As the Ukrainian Gepards deploy, that number could rise.