Ukraine Reliant on Lumbering 'Improvised Fighting Vehicle' a 'Soldier Could Outpace'

Ukraine has nothing but limited territorial gains and huge losses in personnel and weaponry to show for its summer counteroffensive. Despite the enormous amount of military aid supplied by NATO countries to Kiev, Russian forces have been successfully repelling Ukrainian attacks, destroying and capturing foreign military equipment.

The Kiev regime’s military has been relying on an improvised infantry fighting vehicle (IFV) whose lumbering pace is such that a soldier could easily walk as fast, claims a US report. The faulty IFV is impaired in other ways as well.

As the Ukrainian botched counteroffensive drags on, piling up horrific losses in manpower and NATO-gifted weaponry, most of the almost 1,200 IFVs Ukraine had at the start of the conflict – Soviet-era BMP-1s – have been wiped out, the outlet said. Russian forces during the course of the special military operation have “destroyed or captured nearly 700 of the original IFVs,” it added. Accordingly, the Ukrainian Armed Forces are facing a vehicle shortage that has prompted them to "improvise”.

What they reportedly did was to pull the vintage 13-ton-weiging MT-LB armored tractor, dating back to the Seventies, out of long-term storage. This was provided with extra armor, as the original armor of an MT-LB is no more than 14mm thick, added the report, and can “barely” resist fire from a machine-gun. After a remotely controlled weapons station (RWS) was also added, the result was the BMP-1LB, used as a “surrogate” IFV.

Screenshot of a BMP-1LB taken from social media.

© Photo : Forbes

The BMP-1LB has a three-person crew, with eight infantry personnel fitting into the main compartment. The outlet claims Kiev still has a vast array of these antiquated dust-covered MT-LB armored tractors, the last of which rolled off the factory floor in the early 2000s.

However, the improvised IFV is seriously flawed, added the report. First, the RWS is prone to jamming, rendering its one gun useless when it happens. Second, when the aforementioned extra armor was tacked on top of the hull, it resulted in “excess mass affecting the mobility of the armored vehicle”.

Although it can reach a speed of “up to 31 miles (50 km) per hour" on a straight road, once obstacles appear and require maneuvering, the improvised IFV reportedly drops its speed to a crawl. Thus, movement in forests was at times “equal to the speed of soldiers”, according to the report.

The armored trucks that have been donated by the West to Ukraine are also reportedly being used as “surrogate” IFVs, as the Kiev regime's army is losing such vehicles "at a rate of roughly one per day".

Despite billions'-worth of Western military assistance being sent, the Ukrainian military’s much-touted counteroffensive has failed to achieve results, prompting US and NATO officials to cite an array of reasons for the disappointing display. They have been blaming Kiev’s “tactics”, limited training time for Ukrainian troops in using advanced NATO heavy weapons, improper use or overuse of some of the hardware, and lack of maintenance, among others.

However, Russia’s artillery, air and intelligence superiority are really what are behind the unimpressive territorial gains and horrific losses in personnel and equipment suffered by Ukraine’s military - something that most Western observers have neglected to mention.