Ukraine temporarily withdrew American Abrams tanks from combat due to Russian drones

Ukraine has temporarily withdrawn American Abrams M1A1 tanks from combat, which proved to be vulnerable to the deployment of drones, the AP agency wrote, citing US military officials.

The United States (US) agreed last January to send 31 of these machines after months of Ukrainian insistence. Kiev claimed that the tanks, at a price of about ten million dollars a piece (roughly 235 million crowns), are key to breaking through the Russian lines. In September, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced in a telegram that the Abrams had arrived in Ukraine.

But the battlefield has changed significantly in the meantime, largely due to the ubiquity of reconnaissance drones and the deployment of “hunter drones” and “killer drones,” AP writes. It is difficult to protect tanks once they are detected by drones. Then they will either destroy them or fire more weapons at them. Five of the 31 American tanks were already lost in the Russian attacks.

Ukraine’s expected counteroffensive last year stalled, and the deployment of the Abrams on the battlefield began to be considered a necessary step to break through the fortified Russian defenses. However, Ukraine has deployed them only to a limited extent, and US-style combined operations are not part of Ukrainian operations, a Pentagon official said. Several tanks were lost in the recent retreat from Avdijivka, a city in eastern Ukraine that has been heavily contested for months, a Pentagon official added.

The proliferation of drones on the Ukrainian battlefield means “there is no open space that you can just fly over without fear of detection,” a senior Pentagon official told reporters.

For now, U.S. tanks have been withdrawn from the front lines and the U.S. will work with the Ukrainians to develop new tactics, said Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Christopher Grady and another Pentagon official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

“When you think about how the fight has evolved, deploying armor en masse in a drone-saturated environment can be risky,” Grady told the AP this week. He stressed that tanks are still an important weapon, but it is necessary to work with the Ukrainians and other partners to develop a new way of deploying tanks.