Ukraine's Leopard 1A5 Tanks Are Finally Arriving In Large Numbers

It took nearly two years

An up-armored Ukrainian Leopard 1A5. Via social media

Twenty months after pledging nearly 200 surplus Leopard 1A5 tanks to Ukraine, a Danish-Dutch-German consortium is finally delivering the 1980s-vintage tanks in substantial quantities.

Around 80 of the 40-ton, four-person tanks have arrived in Ukraine. The Ukrainian defense ministry is doling them out to various brigades, so far including the 5th Tank Brigade, 44th Mechanized Brigade and 59th Motorized Brigade. A Ukrainian battalion normally has 31 tanks.

As they arrive, many of the tanks are undergoing significant up-armoring to help mitigate their greatest weakness: their thin armor, which is just 70 millimeters thick at its thickest. That’s a third the protection that a contemporary Soviet-made T-72 enjoys.

The locally-applied protection includes two types or explosive reactive armor: Kontakt bricks for most of the tank including the turret and hull and a few Nizh bricks for the frontal glacis plate.

If the Ukrainians give the Leopard 1A5s the same additional protection they’re applying to their 20 or so—out of 31—surviving American-made M-1 Abrams tanks, look for anti-drone cage armor atop the turret as well as drone-grounding radio jammers.

A few Leopard 1A5s, including some with only their original armor, already have seen combat, possibly with the 44th Mechanized Brigade. The analysts at the open-source intelligence collective Oryx have confirmed two destroyed Leopard 1A5s and one damaged one.

Expect more Leopard 1A5s to roll into action soon. The Ukrainian army and air assault forces are quickly depleting their 2023 consignments of German-made Leopard 2s, Swedish Strv 122s, British-made Challenger 2s and M-1s: around 120 tanks, in all. Slightly more than half have been destroyed, damaged, abandoned or captured. While the damaged tanks might be recoverable, that takes time—many months, in the case of the newer Leopard 2s.

The depletion of the initial batches of Western tanks has compelled the Ukrainian armed forces to lean more heavily on their existing stocks of Soviet-vintage, but heavily upgraded, T-64s. Luckily for them, there are still hundreds of T-64s in storage.

Even so, the up-armored Leopard 1A5s are set to play a significant role in the war in 2025 as they finally arrive in sufficient numbers to equip entire battalions.

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