Ukraine’s DIY Fighting Vehicle Is So Slow, A Soldier Can Walk As Fast

The Ukrainian armed forces began Russia’s wider war on Ukraine in February 2022 with around 1,200 infantry fighting vehicles: most of them ex-Soviet BMP-1s.

Twenty months later, Russia has destroyed or captured nearly 700 of the original IFVs. These losses aren’t the only motivation for the Ukrainians’ development of an improvised fighting vehicle—but they’re a big one.

That the ersatz IFV has some big problems speaks to the urgency of the vehicle-shortage. For one, the vehicle under certain conditions drives as slowly as a person walks.

To make good combat losses, Ukraine has pulled potentially hundreds of old BMPs out of storage, and Kyiv’s foreign allies have pledged around 3,000 IFVs and less-well-armed armored personnel carriers.

That should translate into a surplus of more than 2,000 IFVs and APCs. Or more than 3,000 if you count the thousand or so armored trucks Ukraine also has gotten, and which the Ukrainians use as surrogate IFVs.

But 3,000 extra fighting vehicles still isn’t enough. Not when the Ukrainian armed forces have roughly doubled in size over the past two years, while also getting significantly heavier.

A persistent shortage of IFVs has made the Ukrainians a bit desperate, much in the way the equally-stressed Russians—who have lost 2,500 of their 5,200 pre-war BMPs—also are getting desperate.

To keep their regiments in armor, the Russians have pulled old—very old, in some cases—armored vehicles out of long-term storage and up-armed them with whatever spare turrets and weapons they have lying around.

But they’re not alone. The Ukrainians are doing the same thing, if a bit more elegantly. To make up the difference between their combat-losses and expanding force-structure on one hand, and inadequate donations of IFVs on the other, the Ukrainian armed forces have developed a “standard” improvised IFV. The BMP-1LB.

The BMP-1LB is a 1970s-vintage MT-LB armored tractor with add-on armor and a remotely-controlled weapons station. The extra armor might double the protection the 13-ton MT-LB gets from its original armor, which is just 14 millimeters thick at its thickest and barely can stop machine-gun fire.

The RWS with its day-night optics and single 14.5-millimeter machine gun helps the BMP-1LB’s three-person crew to support the eight infantry who ride in its main compartment.

It’s an expedient that makes use of the vast stocks of old MT-LBs in storage in Ukraine. The last brand-new armored tractor rolled off the factory floor in Kharkiv, in northeastern Ukraine, in the early 2000s following a three-decade production run; 20 years later, there might be hundreds of them collecting dust somewhere.

Ukrainian industry also produces an array of remote turrets, often in conjunction with Turkish industry.

But the MT-LB IFV has some serious flaws, according to Militarynyi. The RWS—which accounts for half of the roughly $400,000 cost of a single BMP-1LB—is delicate and prone to jamming. And since it’s got just the one gun, instead of the two guns many RWSs have, it’s useless once it jams.

A layer of additional armor atop the MT-LB’s hull, with a thin empty space in-between, results in a crude kind of “spaced armor” that helps to sap a projectile’s energy as it punches through.

But that armor is heavy, and comes with a weight penalty. “Excess mass is also affecting the mobility of the armored vehicle,” Militarynyi explained. “On a straight road, it can reach speeds of up to [31 miles per hour], but the speed drops sharply with the emergency maneuvers between the obstacles.”

“According to the military, during the movement in forests, the speed of BMPs was sometimes equal to the speed of soldiers.” That’s slow.

A BMP-1LB might be better than nothing in an expanding army that’s losing IFVs at a rate of roughly one per day. But only barely. While amateur observers might worry about how many tanks Ukraine is getting from its allies, what it really needs is modern IFVs. Lots of them.