Ukraine’s CV90 Fighting Vehicles Have Guns Like Chainsaws

Ukraine’s Swedish-made CV90 fighting vehicles have arrived at the front line, apparently somewhere around Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region.

The deployment makes sense. While southern Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Oblast is the locus of the Ukrainian armed forces’ three-week-old counteroffensive, Kyiv’s troops also are counterattacking north and south of the ruins of Bakhmut, which Russian forces captured back in May after months of human-wave assaults costing thousands of lives.

The CV90s significantly boost Ukrainian firepower in the Bakhmut sector. They could help the Ukrainians to break through Russian fortifications in the area—and also help them to exploit any breakthroughs.

The tracked, three-crew CV90, built by Swedish firms Hägglunds and Bofors, weighs 37 tons. In its standard version it carries up to six infantry and packs an autocannon in an armored turret.

The CV90 is popular in northern Europe—and it’s not hard to see why. The CV90’s designers optimized the vehicle for operations in Scandinavia’s forests. It just so happens that eastern Ukraine also has lots of trees, many of them on commercial plantations.

Sweden back in January pledged 50 CV90s to Ukraine’s war effort. We don’t know which brigade operates them—or even which service: the army, the marines or the separate air-assault forces.

But knew all along that the ex-Swedish fighting vehicles would join the counteroffensive. “We will be at the center of it,” one Ukrainian CV90 trainee said in early June. The CV90s began arriving in Ukraine a couple of weeks later in mid-June.

The CV90 is the third of three tracked fighting vehicle types Ukraine has received from its foreign allies—and the second type to reach the front line. Ukraine also is getting more than 150 M-2s from the United States as well as 60 Marders from Germany.

The thickly-armored Marders, which belong to the Ukrainian air-assault forces’ 82nd Brigade, have yet to see combat. But the M-2s in service with the Ukrainian army’s 47th Assault Brigade have been in the thick of the fighting in Zaporizhzhia Oblast since the start of the counteroffensive on June 4.

The 47th Brigade lost at least 17 of the 28-ton, three-crew IFVs—which can carry up to seven infantry—in a single failed assault south of Mala Tokmachka on June 8. The M-2s and accompanying tanks and engineering vehicles came under attack by Russian helicopters then got stuck in a minefield.

Ukrainian forces eventually found a way around that minefield, freeing the surviving M-2s to do what they do best: move swiftly with their embarked infantry and engage the enemy at long range, especially at night.

In addition to its 25-millimeter autocannon, the M-2 packs a twin launcher for 50-pound TOW anti-tank missiles that range as far as two miles. We recently saw the first video evidence of Ukrainian M-2s shooting TOWs at Russian vehicles.

The problem with the TOW, as well as with other anti-tank missiles, is that it requires a clear line of sight. It’s not for no reason the Ukrainians have deployed their M-2s to the south, which mostly is open fields.

The CV90 by contrast is optimized for a close fight on wooded terrain. Its main weapon, a 40-millimeter L/70 autocannon, fires two-pound shells at a rate of up to five rounds a second at a thousand-yard-a-second initial velocity.

That’s a lot of metal, moving really fast. Up close, the L/70 is like a chainsaw—especially when firing armor-piercing sabot rounds. Trees are no obstacle.