A Russian Drone Found the Toughest Armor on the Battlefield—a Ukrainian Leopard 2A6.
Russian observers celebrated a drone strike on a Leopard 2A6 near Pysarivka. They filmed the moment it hit the tank’s frontal turret—the exact spot where its armor is thickest.
On Wednesday, Russian state media posted a video captured from a Russian first-person-view drone flying low over the town of Pysarivka, in northern Ukraine’s Sumy Oblast 10 km from the border. Around 10 Ukrainian brigades with no more than 20,000 troops are holding off a much larger Russian force—50,000 troops in all—along a defensive line a few kilometers north of Pysarivka.
In the video, the Russian FPV accelerates into a Leopard 2A6 tank. The video ends as the drone strikes the front of the 69-ton tank’s turret. Don’t grieve for the tank or its crew. The Leopard 2A6 and its close cousin, the Swedish Strv 122, may be the best-protected tanks in the Ukrainian inventory. And their heaviest armor—hundreds of millimeters thick—is at precisely the spot the Russian drone struck that tank in Pysarivka.
Tanks are playing a smaller and smaller role along the 1,100-km front line of Russia’s 41-month wider war on Ukraine and tiny drones proliferate, making any movement by big, slow vehicles extremely dangerous for them and their crews. Tanks tend to hide inside or underground most of the time, deploying only briefly in order to fire a few rounds at targets kilometers away, before retreating back into hiding.