The Russian Army’s Huge Engineering Vehicles Could Carve Paths Across Ukraine

Eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region, the likeliest battleground in the event Russia widens its eight-year war on Ukraine, is rough terrain.

But the Russian army has a vehicle for that. A monstrous, 40-ton combat engineering vehicle that can carve a path through all but the densest forest. These BAT-2 vehicles have already appeared in and around separatist-controlled Donbas.

Donbas’s patchwork of pine forests and ruined industrial sites—stitched together via long-neglected roads—complicates mobility for defenders and attackers, but favors the defenders who can dig in among the trees and old factories.

Tanks and other tracked armored vehicles can cross rough terrain—that’s the whole point of tracks, after all. But even tanks might struggle across much of Donbas. It’s the job of the Russian army’s combat engineers, riding in BAT-2s and other vehicles, to clear paths for the assault troops.

The BAT-2 is just one of a host of specialized vehicles in the Russian order of battle. Visually, it might be the most intimidating. The BAT-2 adds a dozer blade, a soil-ripper spike, a two-ton crane and a crew compartment for eight people onto the lower hull and suspension of a T-64 tank.

In Russian army doctrine, engineers attached to a battalion tactical group form a “movement support detachment”—“OOD” is Russian acronym—that trails behind the first line of tanks. Each OOD has four BAT-2s.

“The mission of the OOD is to move behind the advance guard or forward detachment (about two hours ahead of the main body) to conduct engineer reconnaissance and to improve the axis of advance by filling in craters, constructing bypasses, improving rugged sections, bridging minor gaps or repairing bridges and clearing paths through minefields,” Lester Grau and Charles Bartles noted in The Russian Way of War.

“Should the march culminate in an attack, the OOD then moves behind the attacking first echelon or prepares a route for the commitment of the second echelon,” Grau and Bartles explained.

The BAT-2s are scary-looking, but they’re also lightly armored and thus vulnerable to enemy gunners. The BAT-2s help clear paths for the tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, but they also rely on tanks and fighting vehicles to protect them while they work, according to Grau and Bartles.

BAT-2s in any event surely would be critical to any Russian attack across Donbas. Some of the vehicles already are in the region. Social-media users and European arms-monitors spotted BAT-2s in Donbas in 2015 and again in 2019. And last month, someone shot a video of a train hauling a BAT-2 and other engineering vehicles, heading toward the Russia-Ukraine border.