The Great Winter Tank Hunt
Around Lyman, Ukrainian drones target Russian tanks fighting as artillery
There are several reasons why some Russian field armies use tanks as artillery, shooting indirectly at targets beyond visual range.
Supply is one issue. Thanks to an intensive effort to restore old Cold War tanks, the Russians have at least as many tanks today as they did on the even of their wider war on Ukraine 48 months ago.
At the same time, tanks are no longer very useful in their original close combat role, mostly owing to the extreme threat from mines and drones. That means thousands of Russian tanks are idle—and available to replace some of the 2,000 or so howitzers and rocket launchers the Russians have lost out of the approximately 4,900 big guns and launchers they had in February 2022.
The main guns on tanks are usually only good out to a few miles and lack accuracy because their sights are optimized for direct fire. Still, tanks-as-howitzers possess at least one advantage: their greater protection from return fire.
Tanks “make for an inefficient form of artillery,” Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds explained in a 2023 study for the Royal United Services Institute in London.
“Nevertheless, these engagements can often be made from positions that would not be viable for artillery, because of the tanks’ greater protection and thus reduced vulnerability to counterbattery fire,” Watling and Reynolds pointed out.
Maybe that’s why the Russian 20th Combined Arms Army, deployed east of Lyman in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast, seems to favor tanks for indirect fire. According to Ukrainian drone operator Kriegsforscher, the 20th CAA “prefers to use tanks from the 59th [Tank Regiment] from closed firing positions instead of towed artillery.”
