The Rarest & Most Specialized Ukrainian Armored Vehicle Has Appeared Just Three Times In Three Years

The T-64 breacher clears mines and obstacles

A unique breaching vehicle based on the chassis of a T-64 tank, minus its turret, might be the rarest vehicle on the Ukrainian side of Russia’s 36-month wider war on Ukraine. It’s possible there’s just one of them.

After an apparent yearlong absence, the three-year-old vehicle may have reappeared along the 700-mile front line—clearing a path for up-armored M-1A1 tanks and up-gunned BMP-1TS infantry fighting vehicles belonging to the 425th Assault Regiment as the vehicles counterattacked along one of the deadliest roads in Ukraine around Christmas Day. (See video above.)

The counterattack sputtered and the 425th Assault Regiment abandoned one of its M-1s as well as a BMP. Whether the T-64 breaching vehicle survived is less clear. Maybe we’ll see it again soon. Maybe it’ll be another year.

A breaching vehicle does as its name implies: fitted with mine rollers, mine plows and sometimes minefield-clearing explosive line charges, it breaches enemy minefields, plows through earthen berms and fills in anti-tank ditches—all while under fire.