In early April, Ukrainian drone operators spotted, outside Krasnohorivka just west of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, a Russian T-72 tank with a crude metal roof atop its hull and turret.
Soon more of the up-armored tanks—many also sporting anti-drone radio jammers—were appearing all along the 600-mile front line of Russia’s 27-month wider war on Ukraine.
The Russians call the bizarre vehicles “tsar’s BBQs.” The Ukrainians call them “turtle tanks.” Now, in their second month of operations as part of Russia’s intensifying winter-spring offensive, the turtle tanks have gained another layer of improvised armor: metal grills on top of their solid metal shells.
The turtle tanks are getting bigger and stranger. This is not to say they don’t work for their apparent primary purpose. Fitted with mine-triggering metal rollers, the odd vehicle type “is being used as a mine-clearance vehicle ahead of armored assault columns,” weapons historian Matthew Moss noted.
The layers of do-it-yourself armor, installed in workshops near the front, protect the turtle tanks from the 100,000 explosive first-person-view drones the Ukrainians fling at the attacking Russians every month. “Everyone laughs at their construction of the barns, but in fact they work like Hell,” one Ukrainian Telegram channel reported. “A lot of FPVs were spent on one tank.”
The turtle tanks are an adaptation. The problem is that they’re an adaptation to just one threat. As long as Ukrainian troops are short of artillery and anti-tank missiles and compensating with huge numbers of locally made FPV drones, as has been the case for months now, a turtle tank stands a decent chance of doing its job and surviving an assault.
But now that Republicans in the U.S. Congress have finally ended their six-month blockade of further U.S. aid to Ukraine, freeing up $61 billion in fresh financing, Ukrainian brigades are about to get a lot of missiles and shells. The Pentagon has already shipped the first $1 billion worth of munitions.
Turtle tanks’ double-thick DIY armor might protect them from two-pound FPV drones, each packing a pound of explosives. But “their shells offer little protection against anything else,” Moss explained.
And the add-on armor might be practically useless against a 35-pound Javelin missile with a 20-pound tandem warhead specifically designed to punch through multiple layers of protection.
Don’t count on a turtle tank crew dodging a Ukrainian Javelin team. Not only is the DIY vehicle heavy and slow, but recent videos underscore just how terrible the crew’s visibility is through all that improvised armor. It’s so hard to see past the armored shell that at least one turtle tank crew was observed taking a wrong turn during an attack, sending the tank veering away from Ukrainian lines.
Sources:
1. Constantine: https://twitter.com/Teoyaomiquu/status/1787162849975873639
2. Life from the Front Line: https://t.me/The_life_of_Predova/2241
3. Matthew Moss: https://armourersbench.com/2024/04/28/tsar-mangal-return-of-the-turtle-tanks/