The M-1 in the instant before the drone strikes it.
Ukrainian special forces capture
Why did Ukrainian special forces blow up one of Ukraine’s few surviving U.S.-made M-1 Abrams tanks last week? It’s possible they were trying to keep it from falling into Russian hands.
On Jan. 5, a powerful Russian force with around 50 armored vehicles—reportedly drawn from the 155th and 810th Naval Infantry Brigades and the 106th Airborne Division—attacked Ukrainian lines along the western edge of the 250-square-mile Ukrainian forces carved out of western Russia’s Kursk Oblast in August.
The Russian assault may have been an attempt to spoil a simultaneous Ukrainian assault that launched just a few miles to the east around the same time.
Whatever the motive, the Russian attack—like the Ukrainian attack—ended in disaster for the attackers. The Ukrainian 47th Mechanized Brigade reported killing 45 Russians and wounding 53, for a total Russian loss of “practically a company,” according to the brigade.
In the process of demolishing the Russian assault column, a Ukrainian special forces drone team also hit one of the 47th Mechanized Brigade’s M-1s. A video montage of drone strikes the commandos circulated on social media clearly depicts an explosive first-person-view drone barreling toward an unmoving Abrams sitting derelict on a snowy Kursk road.
The United States donated 31 of the 69-ton, four-person M-1s in 2023. In a year and a half of hard fighting, the 47th Mechanized Brigade—the sole Ukrainian user of the high-tech Abrams—has lost at least nine, and potentially as many as 17, of the tanks.
The precise tally of M-1 losses depends on whether immobilized tanks—those rendered unusable by mines, drones or missiles but not totally destroyed—are recoverable by Ukrainian engineers. When a damaged tank can’t be towed away, usually because it’s too dangerous to try, the Ukrainians often target the tank in order to prevent the Russians from capturing it intact.
That’s apparently what happened on Jan. 5 amid that failed Russian assault. It’s possible the 47th Mechanized Brigade abandoned one of its dozen or so remaining active M-1s during the Jan. 5 fighting. It’s also possible the tank got hit and stranded during an earlier battle in Kursk, but had been too exposed to Russian fire for engineers to fetch.
There’s a photo of an M-1 the 47th Mechanized Brigade abandoned on or around Dec. 11. The landscape in the photo seems to match that in the drone feed in the instant before the drone struck the Abrams on Jan. 5.
It’s possible the Ukrainian drone operators whose tiny robots swarmed that Russian assault column last week finally decided it was time to blow up an abandoned Ukrainian tank that had been sitting there for nearly a month, a tantalizing but unreachable prize for both armies in Kursk.
For Ukraine, losing one more M-1 isn’t the crisis it might’ve been just a few months ago. While the United States has declined to donate additional Abrams—despite having thousands in storage—Australia has stepped up as a major future source of M-1s.
The Australian army recently retired its older Abrams in favor of newer versions of the same tank. Canberra pledged 49 0f the surplus tanks to the Ukrainian war effort back in October—and the first of them could begin arriving any time now.