On the Front in Ukraine
Going Into Battle in a Leopard 2 Tank
The Ukrainian counteroffensive has begun, and Western war equipment is playing a vital role. A tank unit in Zaporizhzhia is in the thick of the fight.
By Alexander Sarovic in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine
Going into battle in a tank is frightening, something that Sasha, 55, is quick to admit.
"For the enemy, we are always the first target," the tank commander says.
Misha, the 25-year-old gunner, says that he has always been lucky so far.
"Two of my tanks have been destroyed since the beginning of the war, but I’m still alive."
There are even soldiers who try to get out of it, says the 22-year-old loader, who goes by the nom de guerre "Hudzik."
Sometimes, he says, soldiers will even invent a problem with their tank.
None of the three Ukrainian soldiers hold it against those who refuse to fight.
Misha knows that his luck, too, could turn.
"If they hit the turret, you’re just a pile of ashes," he says.
"It’s better to refuse to go into battle than to chicken out in the middle of the fight," Hudzik says.
Fear, says Sasha, isn’t the problem. That begins to fade once the first shot is fired. Panic though – that must be avoided at all costs.
Sasha, Misha and Hudzik are all too familiar with the fight against fear – and with the battle against the Russians as well.
The three are among the most experienced tank crew members in the Ukrainian army and have been at it for more than 15 months.
They were there for the unsuccessful defense of southern Ukraine early in the war, for the retaking of Kherson in the fall, and for the fighting around Soledar and Bakhmut in the winter.
On one hot afternoon last weekend, the three are sitting in the yard of their billet – a small, abandoned and heavily damaged farmhouse in the Zaporizhzhia region of southeastern Ukraine.
A cherry tree provides some shade while large, insatiable mosquitoes buzz around.
Hudzik heats water on a small, red cooker before pouring it into a package of instant porridge.
The crew is waiting for their next orders.
A Broad Advance
For the last few days, they have been part of another large battle that will determine the future of this war.
Ukraine has begun its counteroffensive, aimed at decisively weakening the Russian occupiers.
It is an advance across a broad front: in the northeast toward the Luhansk region and near Bakhmut, and in southern Donbas.
Perhaps the most important part of the offensive from a strategic point of view, however, is here, on the Zaporizhzhia front.
The Ukrainians are pressing the attack in the region at numerous points, with the goal of breaking through the front toward the Sea of Asov, advancing to the occupied cities such as Melitopol or Mariupol and driving a wedge between the Russians in the south and those in the east.
Since the beginning of the offensive just over a week ago, the Ukrainian army has liberated a few villages in this area of the front and is now slowly advancing towards the main Russian lines of defense.
These heavily defended positions will be the true challenge for the Ukrainian counteroffensive: The Russians have had several months to prepare them.
Mischa, 25 Foto: Maxim Dondyuk / DER SPIEGELIn this early phase of the attack, Sasha, Misha and Hudzik have made a crucial contribution, providing cover to Ukrainian infantrymen as they storm the Russian trenches.
Their tanks are parked in front of the house beneath pear trees and camouflage netting.
And they are among the most effective weapons that the German military has been able to contribute to the Ukrainian war effort thus far: two Leopard 2A6 battle tanks.
They are mobile, camouflage fortresses.
Projectiles from Russian rocket-propelled grenade launchers bounce off like small rocks, say the eight soldiers who go into battle with the two Leopards.
Misha, the gunner, fires at his targets out of the five-meter-long gun, relying on lasers to help him aim.
The cockpit is full of controls labeled in German.
Sasha is the crew chief in the other tank, where the loader Hudzik also serves, lifting the shells – each weighing more than 20 kilograms – out of a small ammunition stowage area and preparing them to be fired.
Each tank also has a driver, called a "mechanic" by the crews.
Their first two battles on the Zaporizhzhia front took place at night.
The fighting was intense, say the tank crew members, adding that the Russians were well dug in.
And, offers Misha, the troops on the other side are anything but greenhorns.
"The new ones would run away as soon as a Leopard fired on them. But these fuckers are tough."
The soldiers say the Russians have mined pretty much everything.
Three Leopard tanks drove over mines on the first day, they say.
One of them was apparently destroyed while the second was able to drive away on its own.
The third tank, they say, is still in one piece, but they haven’t yet been able to recover it because the area is heavily mined and an incapacitated Bradley tank from the U.S. is in the way.
Still, the soldiers are satisfied.
"Already, we’ve advanced to within 600 meters of our objective," says Sasha.
"That’s a good result."
Misha reports that the night-vision capabilities of the Leopards makes it easy for him to see the Russians.
He uses fragmentation munitions.
"I just aim at a tree and pieces of shrapnel fly everywhere.
And down below in the trench, everyone’s dead," he says.
Sasha, 55 Foto: Maxim Dondyuk / DER SPIEGELThe gunner, a tall, wiry martial arts practitioner with broad shoulders and alert eyes was trained on the Leopard in the German city of Munster.
From mid-February to mid-March, trainers from the German military, the Bundeswehr, provided instruction to him and other tank crew members.
As soon as they arrived, the Ukrainians say, they changed into German uniforms and began their schooling.
The trainers were good people, says Hudzik, whose nickname translates as "button."
Communication problems, though, did sometimes arise.
"One time, one of the Germans explained something to us for a quarter of an hour," says the loader, the joker of the crew.
"And all he really wanted to say was: flip the switch up!"
For the Ukrainian trainees, the five weeks in Germany were a rare respite from the fighting.
One evening, says Misha, he went with a translator to a club not far from Munster.
It was the first time he had been out for almost a year and a half.
"I stayed all night. It wouldn’t have been worth it for just a couple of hours," he says.
Loud music, techno and trance: Perfect for forgetting.
Heavy Losses
Misha enlisted when he was 18.
"As a teenager, I drank too much and did a lot of stupid shit," he says.
His godfather, he says, took him aside one day, slapped him in the face and sent him to the army.
Misha is from Irpin, the city where the Ukrainian army stopped the Russian march on Kyiv last March.
Much of the town was destroyed in the fighting.
He himself was stationed in southern Ukraine during the first weeks of war – where the Russian advance crushed all Ukrainian attempts to slow them down.
In his first battle, fought near Melitopol, Misha’s Soviet-era tank was destroyed.
He says he jumped out and ran a kilometer and a half before finding another, abandoned tank.
He jumped in and drove off.
After that, he participated in the battle to retake parts of the Kherson region, where his unit mostly fired at the Russians from fixed positions.
At the end of the year, the men were then sent to Soledar in Donbas.
A short time later, the town near Bakhmut fell to the Russians, following bloody fighting and a month-long onslaught from Russian mercenaries.
"My tank was the last one to leave Soledar," Misha says.
Sasha, Hudzik and most of the others in the two tank crews, meanwhile, are from Kryvyi Rih, the steel and factory city that is also the hometown of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
As is usually the case in wars, many of the Ukrainian soldiers at the front are those who work with their hands during peacetime: factory workers, day laborers, farmers. Sasha, who was stationed in East Germany in the late 1980s as a Soviet soldier, has worked for decades in brick and steel factories.
Night falls over the villages of Zaporizhzhia.
The few civilians still remaining see almost exclusively Western armaments in the region, aside from a few Kalashnikovs.
Personnel carriers from the U.S. and Australia speed across the country roads, armored giants on wheels. Rockets light up the evening sky like candles, as Ukrainian artillery fires on positions behind the Russian lines.
The Ukrainians are taking heavy losses, a fact that quickly becomes clear despite the order from Kyiv banning access to much of the frontline.
Bloodied Ukrainian soldiers gasping for breath are brought to a hospital just a few kilometers from the front, with doctors saying they have begun seeing a lot more wounded in recent days.
A Ukrainian reconnaissance officer who keeps tabs on the entire southern front says there have been significant losses of both troops and materiel.
Hudzik, 22 Foto: Maxim Dondyuk / DER SPIEGELIt is currently difficult to say how successful Ukraine’s counteroffensive has been thus far.
The bulk of the Ukrainian forces that had been prepared for the endeavor hasn’t even joined the fight yet.
And it could take several more weeks before the Ukrainians even reach Russia’s main lines of defense.
Despite the difficulties, the morale of soldiers in Zaporizhzhia seems to be good.
Part of that has to do with the new equipment from the West, which, as Ukrainian fighters report, offers far more protection.
If they had to rely on Soviet-era personnel carriers, they say, the fighting would be far bloodier.
A Rainy Night with Intense Fighting
In the late evening, the Leopard crew receives its orders, and at around 10 p.m., the two tanks head out.
It would turn out to be a rainy night with eight hours of intensive fighting, as the soldiers describe the next day.
The Russians, they say, used phosphorous bombs and, in the morning, combat helicopters.
The tank crews fired on Russian positions, infantrymen stormed Russian trenches.
The Ukrainians say they made some progress, but remain silent on where or how much ground they gained.
Still, the Leopard tanks are far from perfect.
Mechanics trained in Germany are hard at work on the two tanks, swapping out the gun stabilizer in Sasha’s tank.
There is more to do on the second tank.
Misha had problems aiming during the night.
He climbs into the Leopard, raises the gun by half a meter and spins the turret 90 degrees, and then a bit further.
The tank can still be used in battle, he says, and is able to fire.
But the laser malfunctions when switching to a secondary target, he says.
Their next operation is scheduled for 6 p.m. that evening, but the order never comes.
Instead, two agitated infantrymen from the Azov Brigade stumble into the tank unit’s position.
An older Leopard they say, a Model 2 A4, is stuck in no-man’s-land between the fronts.
They want to try to recover the tank, but they don’t know how to start it.
They came to ask for help and show the tank crewmembers videos on their mobile phones of the inside of the tank.
While the Leopard crew tries to decipher the German terms in the video, the Azov fighters talk about the chaos they experienced during their last battle, about a friendly fire incident among Ukrainian troops.
Moreover, they say, the Russians supposedly managed to capture two tanks.
Saying they are scheduled to head back out again that night, they grab two cans of Redbull and take off.
Having a rest next to the tank. The soldiers are constantly at the ready. Foto: Maxim Dondyuk / DER SPIEGELAt almost the same time, the commander of Misha’s tank, who is also the senior officer for the entire unit, returns from command headquarters.
The men never do learn why the order to head into battle never came.
But their commander did manage to procure a minesweeper for their next operation.
It’s a quiet night for the soldiers, with no attacks from Russian aircraft, and no phosphorous bombs, pieces of which lie scattered around the area.
For the first time in a week, the men can sleep through the night, lined up next to each other on camping pads.
The next morning, they sit around a microwave box that serves as an improvised table.
Fish and meat from cans, wet wipes for their hands – the austere life of a soldier.
The men wait for their next orders, staying ready – for the entire day, if necessary.
The commander of the tank unit having a shave.
The soldiers have been fighting for almost 15 months without a break.
The commander of the tank unit having a shave. The soldiers have been fighting for almost 15 months without a break. Foto: Maxim Dondyuk / DER SPIEGELIt is a strange purgatory where the soldiers exist, one in which two thoughts are unwelcome: the thought of death in battle, and the thought of life far away from the frontlines.
Both just serve to distract them.
But they both nevertheless break through on a regular basis.
Misha talks about the death of a tank soldier from a different unit.
A Russian artillery shell struck him as he was resting next to his Leopard tank – just as Misha does every day.
He also talks about his last visit to his hometown of Irpin.
It lasted just one day.
Long enough to see that his family had rebuilt their home, but not long enough to get used to normal life.
To the house.
The streets.
The quiet.
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