In a welcome move, Italy isn’t just giving Ukraine prized M-113 armored personnel carriers—it’s giving Ukraine VCC-1s, upgraded versions of the classic “battle taxi” that one source described as “an Italian M-113 on steroids.”
The timing matters. Ukrainian medics are getting picked off by cheap suicide drones while trying to evacuate wounded soldiers from trenches. The VCC-1’s extra armor plating can stop drone fragments and small arms fire that punch through standard M-113 aluminum—exactly what evacuation teams need when they’re crawling within 200 meters of Russian positions to grab casualties.
The first photos of the vehicle reportedly en route to Ukraine recently circulated online.
The 12-ton, nine-person tracked vehicles are especially useful as ambulances. Fast, maneuverable, and easy to drive—and wrapped in just enough aluminum armor to offer some protection from artillery fragments and tiny explosive drones—the M-113s and their Italian kin can help medics fetch wounded troops from the front line … and speed them to lifesaving care at a battalion aid station.
Back in the spring, Rome pledged 400 M-113s “and variants” to Kyiv’s war effort.
Ukraine had already received around 1,500 American-designed M-113s plus hundreds of similar Dutch-made YPR-765s—and had lost no fewer than 400 of them in action all along the 1,100-km front line of Russia’s 43-month wider war on Ukraine.
The Ukrainians weren’t familiar with the M-113 prior to the wider war, although the type has been a stalwart of mechanized brigades in NATO armies for half a century.
The Ukrainian drivers in particular were pleased. The M-113 is much more user-friendly than the old Soviet BMP infantry fighting vehicle that many Ukrainian mechanized troops still ride in.
“I pay attention to the road, to what is being done around me,” one Ukrainian M-113 crew member said last year after gaining some experience on the M-113. “I don’t think about how to turn on a lower gear to go uphill, as I had to do on Soviet analogues.”
Read the rest at Euromaidan Press.
