Ukraine Has Mobilized Its Tank Reserves. They’re Already On The Attack.

The Ukrainian army’s 3rd Tank Brigade reportedly has reached the battlefield around Izium, near Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine. The 3rd might be the first of Kyiv’s reserve armored formations to join the fight.

It’s a big deal. Several weeks after pulling its battered, starving forces from northern Ukraine, the Russian army is working to shift battalions south and east in order to redouble its offensive just west of separatist-controlled Donbas and along the Ukrainian coast.

But the Ukrainians are on the move, too. Units that spent the first month of the war defending Kyiv now are free to deploy elsewhere. Meanwhile, reserve formations that as recently as late February lacked people and equipment now are at fighting strength and have begun deploying toward the front.

The 3rd Tank Brigade formed in 2016, joining three other tank brigades—the 4th, 5th and 14th—as back-ups for the Ukrainian army’s two active tank brigades, the 1st and 14th. The 1st Tank Brigade in February and March famously defended the northern city of Chernihiv against a much larger Russian force.

The reserve tank brigade, several thousand troops strong with its headquarters in Khmelnytskyi Oblast in western Ukraine, has the same basic structure as active units—three tank battalions, an infantry battalion plus organic air-defense and artillery units—but has different equipment.

Where active brigades ride in upgraded T-64 tanks, the 3rd and other reserve units have T-72s. The T-72 is a newer design than the 1960s-vintage T-64 is, but the older tank actually is superior in many ways, with thicker armor, a more efficient engine and a more sophisticated autoloader for its 125-millimeter gun.

The Soviet army in the late 1960s pivoted from the T-64 to the cheaper T-72 in order to simplify and maximize production, not because the latter was better. It’s not for no reason the Ukrainians assigned their 700 T-64s to active brigades and mostly held T-72s—as many as 500 of them—in reserve.

Some of the T-72s got a few minor tweaks at a factory in Kyiv, emerging as T-72AMTs.

War, and the destruction of scores of the best T-64s, compelled Kyiv to mobilize the T-72 formations. The 3rd Tank Brigade spent late winter training its reservists—businesspeople, teachers and taxi drivers, according to the unit—on their tanks, BMP-1s and BM-21 rocket launchers.

In the weeks following the Russian invasion, the brigade took in new equipment: medical supplies in late March, body armor in mid-April.

The unit’s first contact with the Russians seems to have come on or before April 2 in eastern Ukraine. 3rd Tank Brigade scouts riding in BMP-1s walked in artillery fire on a Russian T-80 tank unit, destroying or forcing crews to abandon four of them.

The T-80 is based on the T-64; it’s possible the Ukrainians could repair and reuse the abandoned tanks.

More recently, the 3rd Tank Brigade may have joined a Ukrainian assault east from besieged Kharkiv. The attack, which began around Sunday, seems to represent an effort on the part of the Ukrainians to surround the Russian forces occupying nearby Izium and, in the process, cut off the main Russian supply lines through northeast Ukraine to the south.

Mike Martin, a fellow at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, said the Ukrainian attack has a high chance of succeeding. “It appears that the Russians have over-stretched themselves over supply lines that they can’t defend,” Martin tweeted.

If this battle over Izium turns in Ukraine’s favor, the government in Ukraine could owe the victory to a bunch of former taxi drivers and teachers riding in second-line tanks.