Ukraine Deploys Leopard 1A5 'Sniper Tanks' with 7 Brigades
Fitted with layered armor, these aging tanks are surviving drone strikes, even on Ukraine's most dangerous front lines
A photo that circulated online last week confirms it: the Ukrainian army’s 142nd Mechanized Brigade is the latest unit to operate Leopard 1A5 tanks. The vehicles were built in the 1960s and heavily upgraded in the 1980s.
The 40-ton, four-person Leopard 1A5 boasts a reliable 105-millimeter main gun and accurate fire controls, but its armor—just 70 millimeters thick at its thickest—is thin compared to other tanks. That’s a third the protection a contemporary T-72 enjoys.
Still, “it is too early to write off this tank as scrap metal,” insisted the Ukrainian army’s 508th Separate Repair and Restoration Battalion, which repairs damaged armored vehicles. “It just so happened that it first met the opponent it was designed to fight 60 years later—and it’s a completely different tank now, to be fair.”
It’s completely different because it now rolls into battle with at least two extra layers of armor: bricks of explosive reactive armor attached directly to the hull and turret and, over the reactive armor, a skirt of anti-drone netting.
The reactive armor explodes outward when struck, potentially deflecting explosive munitions. The netting catches incoming first-person-view drones before they can strike the tank.