The Ukrainian Army Has Already Lost Half Of Its Unique Leopard 2R Breaching Vehicles

The engineer battalions of the 33rd Mechanized and 47th Assault Brigades, the lead formations in Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive, suffered heavy equipment losses in their assault just south of Mala Tokmachka last week.

The losses include at least five of the battalions’ specialized engineering vehicles. Fitted with mineplows and minerollers, these vehicles lead tanks and infantry fighting vehicles through minefields, plowing and rolling a path so the tanks and IFVs can break through enemy defenses.
That the engineers lost so many vehicles on or around Thursday doesn’t mean the assault on Russian positions near Mala Tokmachka has failed. Yet. A frontal attack on enemy fortifications—a “breach”—is among the most difficult and potentially costliest operations in ground warfare.
Even the best-equipped, best-trained armies expect to lose as much as half of the assault force during a successful breach. As it happens, the Ukrainian 47th Assault Brigade in just a week of hard fighting has abandoned three of its six best breaching vehicles—its Finnish-made Leopard 2Rs. Other confirmed Ukrainian losses include a Soviet-style IMR-2 engineering vehicle and an ex-German Bergepanzer.
The Leopard 2R is a 69-ton, diesel-powered Leopard 2A4 tank that Finnish firm Patria transformed into a specialized breaching vehicle.

Patria popped off the tanks’ turrets and fitted their hulls with full-width mineplows manufactured by Pearson in the United Kingdom. The three-person Leopard 2R puts its 1,500 horsepower behind the plow and pushes. The churn should safely detonate any mines and clear a path all the way to the trenches and berms that armies tend to build behind minefields.
Keeping up its momentum, a Leopard 2R that has just cleared a minefield can shove dirt into the trenches, cross over the resulting earthen bridge then push right through the adjacent berms. Voila—the fortification is breached, and tanks and infantry can rush through.

The Leopard 2R is the Finnish equivalent of the U.S. Army’s Assault Breacher, arguably the world’s best breaching vehicle. But the Finns were unhappy with the Leopard 2R. Finnish soil reportedly is too rocky for the vehicle’s mineplow, even with 1,500 horsepower behind it.

So Helsinki didn’t hesitate to give to Kyiv all six of its Leopard 2Rs. The Finns and Ukrainians clearly hoped Ukraine’s soil would be less problematic for the breaching vehicles.

The dirt doesn’t seem to be the main reason the 47th Brigade lost at least three of its Leopard 2Rs, possibly during a single assault across a Russian minefield south of Mala Tokmachka on Thursday morning. The mines obviously were extremely dense. The Russian air force moreover has control of the air over the southern front line and has been able to fly back-to-back sorties with attack helicopters and fighter-bombers—a critical advantage that Ukraine’s ground-based air-defenses haven’t been able to blunt.