The 47th Assault Brigade is one of the strangest formations in the Ukrainian army. An all-volunteer unit with an unusually strong corps of non-commissioned officers, it carries NATO-style small arms and has trained in NATO tactics.
And it rides in a bizarre mix of vehicles including 99 American-made M-2 fighting vehicles and 28 ex-Slovenian M-55S tanks—well, 27 now that the Russians apparently have destroyed one.
It gets stranger. A video that circulated online in early May indicates the brigade also owns most of the six Leopard 2R breaching vehicles that Finland recently donated to Ukraine. The video depicts a Ukrainian train hauling the 47th Assault Brigade’s M-55S tanks plus at least four tarp-covered Leopard 2Rs.
The Leopard 2R is a 69-ton, diesel-powered Leopard 2A4 tank that Finnish firm Patria transformed into a specialized engineering vehicle whose main role is to punch a hole—a “breach”—in defensive fortifications.
To that end, Patria popped off the tanks’ turrets and fitted their hulls with full-width mine plows 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 mine plow, even with 1,500 horsepower behind it.
It’s not for no reason that Helsinki didn’t hesitate to give away all six of its breaching vehicles. Helsinki’s plan, apparently, is to use tank-mounted mine rollers, not plows, to clear enemy minefields on its own territory. The Finns and Ukrainians must hope Ukraine’s soil is less problematic for the Leopard 2Rs.
The 47th Assault Brigade seems to have staged—by train, clearly—to the forests near Svatove, 80 miles east of free Kharkiv, the brigade’s home. It’s near Svatove that Russian troops apparently knocked out one of the 47th’s M-55S tanks back in mid-May, around a week after the unit headed east.
If the Ukrainian general staff orders the 47th to punch through Russian defenses, perhaps as part of Ukraine’s widely-anticipated 2023 counteroffensive, Leopard 2Rs might lead the way.
