Ukraine’s Busiest Tank Brigade Is Fighting On Two Fronts

Amid relentless fighting and heavy losses, the Ukrainian army has struggled to form new tank brigades. But the tank brigades it has formed are fighting hard on the war’s two main fronts—in the east in the Donbas region and in the south around the Russian-occupied port of Kherson.

No unit is busier than the 17th Tank Brigade. It appears the brigade has split its three armored battalions, each equipped with as many as 30 T-64 tanks, between the east and the south. It’s a single brigade with just a few thousand troops, spread out across hundreds of miles of front.

The 17th TB sparked excitement on Russian social media yesterday when one of the brigade’s battalions joined the elite 128th Mountain Brigade for an advance on Beryslav, a city on the Dnipro River 35 miles east of Kherson that’s widely considered the Russian army’s safest way across the Dnipro and out of Kherson Oblast in the event the Ukrainians seem poised to liberate the oblast.

Following an intensive artillery barrage supported by TB-2 drones, the 128th MB attacked toward Beryslav. When the mountain troops suffered casualties, a company from the 17th TB—reportedly, the reserve force for the operation—joined the fight.

It’s unclear how much ground the Ukrainians gained, if they gained any. Photos that appeared online today reportedly depict some of the 17th TB’s victims around Kherson, including a howitzer, two MT-LB armored tractors and a cargo truck.

Those kills aside, Kyiv’s southern counteroffensive, which kicked off in late August just days before a second and parallel counteroffensive in the east, seems to have slowed as the looming winter turns the landscape into cold mud.

Exhaustion might also be a factor. The Ukrainian army has suffered far fewer losses than the Russian army has since Russia widened its war on Ukraine starting in late February. But the Ukrainians never had the same reserves of manpower and equipment that the Russians did.

Even as Kyiv’s foreign allies donate more and more tanks and artillery and Ukrainian troops capture more and more Russian equipment, the Ukrainian army has struggled to form new heavy brigades. The army began the war with five or six tank brigades, each with around a hundred T-64 or T-72 tanks. Today the army still has just five or six tank brigades.

To be fair, an huge influx of heavy equipment has allowed the Ukrainian command to up-armor many of its lighter brigades, adding tanks and fighting vehicles to formations that once traveled by truck or armored tractor. The army might not have more tank brigades, but overall it’s got more tanks.

Still, Ukrainian commanders are extremely judicious with how and where they use their few dedicated tank units. At the same time a battalion of the 17th TB was backing up the 128th MB north of Beryslav, a separate 17th TB battalion was “somewhere in eastern Ukraine” helping to liberate towns from a collapsing Russian army, according to the defense ministry in Kyiv.

Photos that circulated online in recent weeks depict the 17th TB’s eastern battalion in action—as well as one of its prizes, a T-80 tank the Ukrainians captured intact from the Russians. It’s one of around 200 usable tanks the Ukrainian army has seized from its retreating enemy since early September.

Prizes like the T-80 help to keep the Ukrainian army’s heavy formations in fighting shape as the war grinds toward its first full winter. But there aren’t yet enough of them for brand-new tank brigades.