“Pack a tank with explosives, have a volunteer drive it, then jump off after pointing it toward the enemy,” Mark Hertling, a retired U.S. While there’s at least one verifiable example of a successful recent VBIED strike, there are many more examples of armored-vehicle IEDs that Ukrainian forces spotted with time to spare-and blew up with a rocket or an explosives-laden drone.

The problem, of course, is that Ukrainian drones patrol the front lines.

A VBIED with four or five tons of explosives can kill unprotected enemy troops from 500 feet away-and hurt them from 3,000 feet away. The idea is to roll the vehicle-borne IEDs onto Ukrainian positions then detonate them, either with a timed trigger or a well-placed missile or rocket hit. Russian troops have been filling the old tanks with four or five tons of explosives, driving them to within sight of Ukrainian lines, jamming their controls in a forward gear then bailing out. In eastern Ukraine, where the Ukrainians have launched a secondary counteroffensive, the T-54/55s have found a different purpose. Even if those reinforcements are 70-year-old T-54/55s. All that is to say, Russian troops in southern Ukraine need all the reinforcements they can get.

A defending army historically tends to suffer many fewer casualties than attacking army does, as an attacker must expose himself while a defender can dig in.īut Ukrainian forces’ aggression, adaptability and precise artillery support seem to have helped their counteroffensive corps to defy historical precedent. That’s weird, and a foreboding sign for Russian forces. Ukrainian losses along this front have been heavy-but Russian losses have been nearly equally heavy, if unofficial tallies of losses by independent analysts are even remotely accurate.

The T-54/55 howitzers appear to be most popular with Russian units in southern Ukraine, where since June 4 Ukrainian forces have been conducting a grinding counteroffensive along several axes.

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