Ukraine Made Just A Handful Of Speedy T-84 Tanks. Now They’re On The Front Line.

Ukraine produced just five or six copies of one of its best tanks—the T-84 Oplot. That’s enough for just one platoon.

But when you’re fighting for your country’s survival, one T-84 platoon is better than no T-84 platoon. The first photos have circulated online depicting the rare tank in combat somewhere in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region.

The T-84 is a Ukrainian version of the Soviet T-80, but with a welded turret, blow-out panels for safer ammunition storage and a high-performance diesel engine that makes the 50-ton tank one of the fastest in the world. Forty miles per hour on a paved road.

But the Malyshev factory in Kharkiv only ever made 10 copies of the T-84 Oplot for the Ukrainian army 20 years ago. Cost was a factor, but so were the many hundreds of perfectly functional T-64 tanks—progenitors of the T-80—the Ukrainian army still possessed, rendering a replacement tank a low priority.

The Ukrainians didn’t even keep all 10. They reportedly sold four of the T-84 Oplots to the Americans for evaluation, leaving maybe six in Ukrainian service. The International Institute for Strategic Studies’ annual The Military Balance guide for 2021 lists just five T-84 Oplots in Ukraine’s inventory.

Whether Ukraine had five or six T-84 Oplots before Russia invaded on the night of Feb. 23, their value quickly rose. In three months of hard fighting, the Russians have destroyed or captured no fewer than 174 of Ukraine’s T-64, T-72 and T-80s tanks out of a pre-war inventory of around 860 total tanks.

Foreign donors have pledged hundreds of additional T-72s. But even so, every tank—and every fighter jet and artillery piece, too—is precious to Ukraine as the war grinds on.

Which is why the Ukrainian army no longer hesitates to press into service even its weirdest and rarest tanks. These include not only the platoon’s worth of T-84 Oplots, but also the various upgraded T-64 Bulats, which the army considered mechanically unreliable and hardly worth the effort until the Russians attacked and altered everyone’s thinking.

It’s not totally clear which unit owns the T-84 Oplots, but the rumor is it’s the 14th Separate Mechanized Brigade, which appears to have divided its battalions between the southern and eastern fronts. The T-84 Oplots seem to be with the eastern units.

The fighting is brutal in that sector. After retreating from northern Ukraine in March and April and stalling out in the south around the same time, the Russian army in May concentrated its best remaining battalions, out of 110 in Ukraine, for a fresh offensive in the Donbas region.

The offensive is targeting one pocket of Ukrainian troops holding the axis from Slovyansk in the west to Severodonetsk in the east, on the far bank of the Donets River. In two weeks of relentless attacks, the Russians have advanced several miles north and south from the salient’s edges, inching ever closer to cutting off the Severodonetsk garrison.

The Ukrainian army is throwing into the fight every available soldier and vehicle that isn’t holding the line around Kharkiv in the north or Kherson in the south. That includes one platoon of T-84 Oplots.

Vehicular oddities are becoming less odd as the war depletes the more numerous tank and fighting vehicle types on both sides. After losing at least 700 T-72, T-80 and T-90 tanks out of the 2,800 they had before the war, the Russians have begun pulling 60-year-old—and thoroughly obsolete—T-62s out of long-term storage and shipping them to units in Ukraine.

The Russian army also has deployed a single company with all dozen or so new BMP-T fighting vehicles to Ukraine. The heavily-armed BMP-Ts with their sophisticated fire-control systems probably are irreplaceable now that foreign sanctions have limited the flow of precision optics into Russia.

But neither the Russians nor the Ukrainians are being precious anymore about their rarest armored vehicles. Using and losing them is preferable to preserving them—and possibly losing the war.