Russia’s Turtle Tanks Might Be Mine-Clearing Breaching Vehicles

At least three times since last week, Ukrainian drone operators in Krasnohorivka, just west of Russia-occupied Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, have spotted some of the strangest armored vehicles of Russia’s 26-month wider war on Ukraine.

These T-72 tanks sport wide metal shells that cover almost all of their turrets and hulls. With the tips of their 125-millimeter main guns poking from underneath the shell like a nose, the up-armored tanks look like mechanical turtles—hence their nickname: “turtle tanks.”

The turtle tanks apparently all belong to the 5th Motor Rifle Brigade, a former Ukrainian separatist unit that is now under Russian command.

Both sides the wider war have up-armored their tanks with an array of add-on armor meant to block missiles and explosive drones. But this do-it-yourself armor usually takes the form of cages or slats that don’t impede a vehicle crew’s visibility and only somewhat restrict the rotation of its gun turret.

The turtle shell armor, by contrast, leaves just a small gap in the front for the crew to see through—and likely prevents the gun from rotating more than a few degrees to the left and right. The obvious drawbacks of the DIY armor beg the question: what is the 5th Motor Rifle Brigade thinking?

Matthew Moss, a weapons historian, has a theory. The turtle tank’s “role seems to be as a breacher,” Moss wrote.

A breacher is a plow-equipped engineering vehicle whose primary mission is to lead other vehicles through a minefield in order to get them close enough to enemy lines to attack. The assumption is that the enemy will also be firing on the breacher as it plows through the buried mines, requiring that the specialized vehicle also be thickly armored.

The U.S. Army has the best breaching vehicle in the world, a nearly 70-ton vehicle that’s basically an M-1 tank minus the gun and with mineclearing gear attached. The Americans quietly donated a few of these Assault Breachers to the Ukrainians late last year.

The Russian army doesn’t have a breacher in the same class as the American vehicle. The Russians’ own IMR engineering vehicles tend to function as wreckers. Weighing just 50 tons or so, they have less protection and a bulky crane.

Confronted with a Ukrainian minefield and swarms of tiny first-person-view drones, and lacking purpose-built breachers, the 5th Motor Rifle Brigade’s technicians may have decided to build their own breachers. At least, that’s what Moss has posited.

If the theory is true, the Russians may have taken older T-72 tanks—perhaps ones whose turrets already had trouble traversing—and added the two things every breaching vehicle requires: extra armor and mineclearing gear.

While the extra armor is easy to verify—it’s the turtle tanks’ signature quality—it’s less obvious that all of the crude enclosed vehicles have front-mounted plows or other hardware for clearing mines.

Analyst Rob Lee, from the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, spotted what he identified as a mine roller—a set of tough wheels that trigger mines slightly ahead of the vehicle—on the third turtle tank, which led a Russian assault on Krasnohorivka on Tuesday.

That turtle tank, which was also the first of its type to sport anti-drone radio-jamming gear, “continued to advance after driving over multiple mines,” Lee noted.

The third turtle tank’s features and actions seem to support Moss’ thesis that the strange improvised vehicles are DIY breachers. If so, they might actually be successful in that role.

Breaching is incredibly dangerous. The Ukrainians have already lost at least two of their six or so Assault Breachers in intensive fighting around Berdychi, just north of Krasnohorivka. But, so far, just one of the turtle tanks has been destroyed—and it got hit by artillery after driving back to its base following a battle on April 8.

If there’s reason to fear for the turtle tanks’ long-term future, it’s that they’re obviously optimized to resist small FPV drones, which typically carry no more than a couple of pounds of explosives.

The drones, which Ukraine deploys at a rate of around 100,000 per month, are an expedient. “We use so much FPV drones because of lack of ammo for mortars, [anti-tank missiles], artillery and even anti-tank mines,” explained a Ukrainian drone operator known as Kriegsforscher.

That lack of ammunition is the inevitable result of the decision, by a minority of Republicans in the U.S. Congress, to block further U.S. aid to Ukraine starting in October. But that aid blockade is set to end this weekend with a planned vote on another $61 billion in U.S. funding for the Ukrainian war effort.

All that is to say, Ukraine’s ammo shortage is about to end. Russia’s minefield-breaching turtle tanks seem to be surviving just fine as long as tiny drones are the main danger they face. Will they survive when the Ukrainians start firing more missiles and artillery at them?

Mick Ryan, a retired Australian army general, described the turtle tanks as “one of the truly bizarre developments in the adaptation battle in Ukraine.” But any advantage they give the Russian army “is likely to be transitory,” Ryan added.