Ukraine Is Probably Getting a Lot More M-1 Abrams Tanks. But Its Only M-1 Brigade Is In Crisis.
There's a leadership meltdown in the 47th Mechanized Brigade even as ex-Australian M-1s seem to be arriving.
Seven months after Australia pledged 49 surplus M-1A1 Abrams tanks to the Ukrainian war effort, the 69-ton tanks are finally beginning to arrive in Ukraine. That’s the implication of a Sunday comment by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.
“I’m grateful for Australia’s comprehensive support, for the Abrams tanks that are helping our warriors defend Ukraine,” Zelensky said at meeting with Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese in Rome. “It is a good thing that we have allies from different continents.”
But the brigade the U.S.-made tanks are likeliest to join, the 47th Mechanized Brigade, is in the throes of a leadership crisis. Citing “clueless leaders” ordering troops to execute “stupid tasks,” one of the brigade’s battalion commanders, Oleksandr Shyrshyn, practically begged for his chain of command to relieve him of duty in a Friday post on social media.
The turmoil in and around the 47th Mechanized Brigade risks wasting precious tanks the Ukrainians have been waiting seven months for.
Pat Conroy, Australia’s defense industry minister, announced the M-1 donation in October. “These tanks will deliver more firepower and mobility to the Ukrainian armed forces, and complement the support provided by our partners for Ukraine's armored brigades,” Conroy said.
The four-person M-1A1s equipped the Australian army’s armored brigade until the brigade upgraded to newer M-1A2s last year. The older tanks are still in “reasonably good working order,” J.C. Dodson, a Ukraine-based defense consultant who helped negotiate the tank transfer, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Ukrainian officials had asked for the old M-1s in 2023, but the Australians waited until their new Abrams arrived before pledging the excess tanks. The U.S. government holds the export license for the Abrams, which are made in Ohio, and the Russia-friendly administration of Pres. Donald Trump waited to sign off on the deal, adding further delay.
In any event, it seems at least some of the tanks are finally on Ukrainian soil. It’s apparent what the Ukrainian army will do with the ex-Australian Abrams. First, it will up-armor them with extra reactive armor, anti-drone cages and radio jammers. (See the video below.) And then it will assign some or all of them to the 47th Mechanized Brigade’s tank battalion, the only Ukrainian unit with any experience on the M-1.
The 47th Mechanized Brigade got all 31 of the surplus M-1A1s the United States pledged to Ukraine in 2023. In 18 months of hard fighting, the brigade has lost at least 11 of the original M-1s. Others have been damaged—and at least a few are probably write-offs. The 47th Mechanized Brigade may be down to half its original tank strength.
Badly needed tanks
The 49 Australian M-1s are enough to restore the brigade’s tank strength while also equipping a second battalion in another brigade—or in one of the new multi-brigade corps the Ukrainian army is standing up.
The same sweeping reorganization that’s introducing the army to corps operations is also reducing, or even eliminating, Ukraine’s four separate tank brigades—each with 100 tanks—in favor of smaller but more numerous separate tank battalions with just 31 tanks apiece.
Ukrainian planners clearly appreciate that tiny explosive drones, and not 69-ton tanks, are now the dominant weapons along the 700-mile front line of Russia’s 39-month wider war on Ukraine.
A leadership crisis may also complicate the 47th Mechanized Brigade’s tank refresh. “I haven’t received any more stupid tasks than in the current direction,” Shyrshyn wrote.
“I’ll tell you the details sometime, but the loss of people has dulled my mind, trembling before the clueless generalship leads to nothing but failures,” Shyrshyn added. “All they are capable of is reprimands, investigations, imposition of penalties. Everyone is going to Hell. Political games and assessment of the real state of affairs do not correspond to either reality or possibilities. They played around.”
It’s possible Shyrshyn is referring to Ukraine’s six-month incursion in western Russia’s Kursk Oblast, which saw a strong Ukrainian force of around a dozen battalions cling to a 250-square-mile salient around the town of Sudzha before an elite Russian drone team finally deployed—and severed the only main supply route between Sudzha and the border with Ukraine, destroying hundreds of Ukrainian vehicles in the process.
The 47th Mechanized Brigade was in the thick of that fighting and, since retreating back to Ukraine in early March, has been supporting more limited raids into Kursk—raids that risk heavy Ukrainian casualties for fleeting territorial gains of questionable strategic value.
That the general staff in Kyiv continues to order brigades to fight their way into Kursk is an ominous development for the units, including the 47th Mechanized Brigade, that must carry out the orders. It’s even more ominous that at least one 47th Mechanized Brigade officer is in open rebellion even as Australian tanks arrive to reinforce his unit.
Read more:
The Ukrainian Army Is Running Out of M-1 Abrams Tanks
The Ukrainian army’s 47th Mechanized Brigade is one of just a half-dozen or so brigades holding the line outside Pokrovsk, a city with a pre-war population of 60,000 that is the locus of Russia’s nearly yearlong offensive in eastern Ukraine.