Flashback: the intense Russian and Ukrainian fight to capture a valuable battlefield prize

In March 2024, reports began to emerge about an intense fight between Russian and Ukrainian forces battling to capture a few very valuable prizes stuck between the two sides.

Russian and Ukrainian forces had been fighting a months-long battle all along the frontlines in Donetsk Oblast but March saw a unique struggle between the two opposing forces play out in the fields outside of a small Ukrainian town called Terny.

Russian and Ukrainian forces in the area were trying to stop the other side from recovering a cluster of damaged and abandoned Western-supplied tanks, and the outcome of the back-and-forth battle produced some very interesting combat footage. 

The story of what happened in the fields outside of Terny was relayed by David Axe of Forbes, who provided much of the necessary background about what happened, what one would need to know to understand the situation, and why both sides wanted these particular damaged and abandoned vehicles. 

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The 21st Mechanized Brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and other units operating around Terny had been holding several Russian motor rifle divisions in the area, some of which are part of the 144th Motor Rifle Division, at bay for some time. Knowing these units is important because of the vehicles they field. 

The Ukrainian 21st Mechanized Brigade was formed back in 2023 and it was trained in Sweden where it was outfitted with Swedish military equipment donated to Kyiv by the Swedish government according to Military Land. The 21st Mechanized Brigade fields several Stridsvagn 122 tanks.

In March 2024, 7 damaged, destroyed, or abandoned of the 10 Swedish Stridsvagn (Strv) 122 tanks Sweden had donated to the Ukrainians by that time in the war were sitting immobilized out in the fields of Terny.

Photo Credit: Wiki Commons By Jorchr, CC BY-SA 3.0

These tanks were a Swedish variant of the Leopard 2A5 and were some of the best main battle tanks that Ukraine had in its tank arsenal, which was why the Ukrainians wanted them back.

Most of the Ukrainian 21st Mechanized Brigade’s Strv 122s were attacked in a two-mile by two-mile (3.2 km by 3.2 km) area of land just outside Terny. But many of them were still in an operational state, according to the Dutch open-source intelligence Oryx. 

Photo Credit: Telegram @btvt2019

Oryx analysts have been counting Russian and Ukrainian equipment losses using only verifiable picture and video evidence since the war began. According to analysis from the group at that point in the war, most of the Strv 122s Ukraine lost weren't sitting disabled near Terny. 

Photo Credit: Telegram @btvt2019

Only one of the 69-ton and four crew tanks was marked as destroyed by Oryx, Forbes’ David Axe explained, meaning that six of the tanks lost near Terny still worked and could be a valuable asset to both sides, though for very different reasons according to Axe. 

Axe explained that the “Ukrainians want to fetch the Strv 122s in order to ship them off to Lithuania for repairs” whereas the “Russians want to fetch the Strv 122s in order to inspect them and, perhaps even more-so, parade them as war prizes.” 

One of the unrecovered Strv 122 tanks was located alongside the road to Terny about a mile from the city, and it was this tank that a crew of Russian engineer vehicles tried to tow away on March 19th, nine days after it was allegedly immobilized by a drone strike. 

“The two Russian BREM recovery vehicles—daisy-chained nose to tail—winched the Strv 122 and began dragging the tank east toward Russian lines, roughly a mile away. They got halfway there before the Ukrainian 12th Azov Brigade spotted them,” Axe wrote. 

Ukrainian drone operators were able to stop Russia from recovering the Strv 122 and were able to immobilize the Russian vehicles trying to tow the Strv 122 away. One of the BREM vehicles was damaged but the other was stuck and likely wasn’t damaged. 

Photo Credit: Twitter @azov_media

However, after a week the tank was still there but the Russian BREM vehicles had gone missing. “Maybe the undamaged one recovered the damaged one and left the tank behind,” explained Ukrainian war analyst Andrew Perpetua in a Twitter post. 

Photo Credit: Twitter @azov_media

Perpetua was the source for much of Axe’s reporting on the interesting battle to recover Ukraine's Strv 122 tanks outside of Terny, and he pointed out that one of the belligerents had gotten the upper hand in the fight. But which had done so wasn't very clear at that time. 

Photo Credit: Twitter @azov_media

Perpetua created a map of where the Strv 122s and a few other vehicles in the region were located before they were either towed away or left to sit in abandoned, and three of the five Strv 122s included in his mapping had been recovered, "presumably by Ukraine," he noted.

“Map, going clockwise from top left: strv122 recovered, strv 122 recovered, Bgbv 120 recovered, strv 122 recovered, bmp-1 still there, strv towed and blasted, cv90 recovered, strv 122 still there,” Perpetua explained. 

“I cannot tell you who recovered any particular vehicle, I can only tell you they are no longer there,” Perpetua commented. However, if it was Ukrainian forces that recovered the tanks, it is not yet known how long before technicians can get them back in the fight. 

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Axe pointed out that there was a major shortage of parts for the German-designed tanks, so it was assumed it would take workers a long time to get any recovered Strv 122 fixed and ready for battle again, a problem which came at a time when Ukraine was already suffering other major issues.