The Prize For Oddest Vehicle Goes To Ukraine’s Frankenstein Scout Car

If necessity is the mother of invention, desperation might be the father of … whatever this is: an ungainly and overly conspicuous do-it-yourself Ukrainian modification of the classic Soviet-vintage BRDM-2 scout car.

There are, among the many improvised vehicle types that Russian and Ukrainian workshops have produced in the 15 months since Russia widened its war on Ukraine, some clear winners.

The Ukrainian MT-LB-12 self-propelled gun, for example. Also: Ukraine’s various Frankenstein fighting vehicles and engineer vehicles based on captured Russian T-62 tanks. And anything on either side that comes armed with the powerful S-60 57-millimeter cannon.

And then there are the losers. Perhaps most notably, the awkward, unguided flak guns Russian technicians created by welding 80-year-old naval turrets onto 70-year-old armored tractors.

The Ukrainian BRDM-2 mods that first appeared this spring are a close second. Oleksandr Tishchenko, a deputy with the Lviv regional council, revealed the first Franken-BRDM back in April during a visit to the eastern front in Donetsk.

Reporting from “the combat units currently holding the defense on the eastern borders of the country,” Tishchenko circulated a photo of a BRDM-2 scout car with a tall superstructure in the place of its usual machine-gun-armed turret.

The mod seems to transform the eight-ton, four-person scout car—with its four wheels and 140-horsepower gasoline engine—into a light armored personnel carrier. Removing the turret and its bustle creates an empty volume inside the vehicle’s hull that should accommodate several infantry.

But the Franken-BRDM pays for its extra troop capacity with a very tall new superstructure that could make it a much easier target for Russian gunners. It was always risky sending a lightly-protected BRDM into harm’s way. It’s even riskier when the vehicle is more than 10 feet tall. That’s nearly twice as tall as usual.

The Ukrainian armed forces can’t get enough APCs. That much is obvious from Kyiv’s willingness to find some use for pretty much any old personnel carrier or infantry fighting vehicle one ally or another drags out of long-term storage and donates to the war effort. Thin-skinned BMP-1s from the 1960s. Weird ex-Australian cargo-carriers. Diminutive Spartans from the United Kingdom.

But these BRDM mods—several have appeared since April—speak to a new level of desperation. There’s no evidence any of the Franken-BRDMs have been knocked out. But that might be because there’s no evidence the Ukrainians have allowed the bizarre APCs to go anywhere near the front line.