Russian Artillery Just Knocked Out A Ukrainian Leopard 1A5 Tank

The Ukrainian army has lost a Leopard 1A5 tank for the first time. At least temporarily.

A video that circulated online on Tuesday depicts one of the German-made tanks—likely belonging to the Ukrainian army’s 44th Mechanized Brigade—eating a Russian munition somewhere in snowy eastern Ukraine.

As a Russian drone watched, the 40-ton, four-person tank rolled along a treeline then turned onto a wide field. Exposed and observed, the tank was an easy target for what may have been a series of artillery shells that walked toward it in increasingly accurate blasts. It’s also possible a buried mine struck the first blow.

In any event, a shell or mine seemingly damaged the tank’s left track and immobilized the vehicle as more shells rained down. The drone video doesn’t depict the crew bailing out, but it does depict the unmoving tank with its two turret hatches wide open. That’s evidence the crew escaped.

It’s possible the tank is recoverable and fixable, assuming Ukrainian engineers can get to it before Russian gunners or drones do.

The 44th Brigade so far has received perhaps a battalion of Leopard 1A5s. Two or three dozen of the 1980s-vintage tanks out of the roughly 200 a German-Dutch-Danish consortium so far has pledged to the Ukrainian war effort.

It was inevitable the brigade eventually would lose tanks. But the first Leopard 1A5 loss came quickly—perhaps just a few weeks after the tanks saw combat for the first time.

The Leopard 1A5 is perhaps the least-protected tank in Russia’s 22-month wider war on Ukraine, but its thin armor—no thicker than 70 millimeters—probably isn’t fully to blame for the recent first loss.

Every tank is vulnerable to mines or artillery striking under or near its tracks. Even the best-protected tank—an American-made M-1 or German-made Leopard 2A6—might throw a track and grind to a halt if a mine or artillery explodes right beside it.

But it’s worth asking why that Leopard 1A5 was moving across an open field in broad daylight. To survive on a high-tech battlefield, a Leopard 1A5 crew should stay under cover, fire its 105-millimeter main gun at long range—two miles or more—and, when it changes position, do so carefully and preferably at night.

The Brazilian army, a major Leopard 1A5 user, trains its crews to hide their thinly-armored tanks in treelines and behind hills. “Use camouflage,” Brazilian captain Adriano Santiago Garcia wrote in a 2020 issue of Armor, the U.S. Army’s official tank journal. “Proper terrain-use,” he stressed.

If one recent media report is indicative, 44th Brigade tankers appreciate that their mounts aren’t designed to take a lot of damage. The best thing about the Leopard 1A5 is that its optics can make out targets at a distance of up to 3.1 miles, a crew member named Vitalii said.

The Leopard 1A5’s rifled main gun can shoot as far as 2.2 miles. Russian tanks’ own technology “does not allow them to engage in a long-range confrontation with us,” Vitalii claimed.

Any howitzer fires farther than 2.2 miles, of course, so a Leopard 1A5’s ability to see and shoot at long range—for a tank, that is—won’t save it from an artillery barrage. The only sure way for a Leopard 1A5 to survive artillery is to avoid artillery, by hiding from the drones that spot targets for the gunners.

Buried mines are harder to dodge, of course.

Why that Leopard 1A5 crew put itself in a position to get bombarded is hard to say without fully understanding the circumstances. But the loss should at least underscore the Leopard 1A5’s weaknesses and highlight its strengths.

To keep from losing too many tanks too fast, the 44th Brigade and other Ukrainian Leopard 1A5 operators should fight from concealment and move while behind terrain or, better yet, under the cover of darkness.