In early April, a Russian assault group attacked positions held by the Ukrainian 12th Azov Brigade outside Terny, just west of Kreminna in eastern Ukraine.
The assault ended in the usual way. Blasted by mines and harried by Ukrainian first-person-view drones, the Russian survivors abandoned their vehicles and fled back toward their own lines, a few hundred yards to the east.
What was special was what they left behind: a nearly intact—and brand-new—T-72B3M tank sporting one of the bulkiest and, in theory, most effective anti-drone radio jammers anyone had seen in Russia’s wider war on Ukraine.
The 12th Azov Brigade mounted a daring three-night mission to inspect, repair and recover the 51-ton T-72. Two months later, the two-year-old T-72 has been inspected, stripped of its jammers, fixed up, repainted with 12th Azov Brigade markings—and assigned to the same tank battalion that helped steal it.
It’s one of two captured T-72B3Ms in service with the 12th Azov Brigade. The Ukrainians have nicknamed it “Tsar Tank” or “Tsar E.W.”—for “electronic warfare.”
Famed Ukrainian war correspondent Yuriy Butusov recently caught up with the 12th Azov Brigade’s equally famous tank commander “Krym,” who lost an eye defending Mariupol in the war’s early months, to fill in the details of the brigade’s epic tank heist. Estonian analyst @wartranslated helpfully translated the interview into English.
“Why is this tank famous?” Butusov asked. “The whole internet talks about it.”
“It’s the first trophy of this kind in the whole war,” Krym said. “It had a huge E.W. system with additional batteries on the sides, tied up with ropes like on a pirate ship.”
Why the Russians piled so much jamming technology onto a single tank is obvious. For six months starting in October, Russia-friendly Republican lawmakers in the U.S. Congress blocked further U.S. aid to Ukraine, starving Ukrainian brigades of the artillery shells and anti-tank missiles they needed to repel Russian assaults.
So the Ukrainians launched a crash program to build, in hundreds of tiny workshops, as many as 100,000 explosive FPV drones as a firepower stopgap. As tiny Ukrainian drones filled the sky, the Russians scrambled to deploy anti-drone defenses—including jammers that could block drones’ control signals.
The Tsar Tank may have represented the zenith of Russian battlefield drone jamming—or nadir, if you judge the jammers by their elegance. Often crude, sloppily built and hastily assembled, the jammers malfunctioned as often as they worked. But they were always subject to intensive scrutiny by Ukrainian intelligence—hence the interest in the stuck Tsar Tank.
How the 12th Azov Brigade fetched the tank is, by now, well-known. On the night of April 3, scouts sneaked out to the tank to inspect it.
They found it tangled in barbed wire and resting atop an unexploded anti-tank mine, its 150-pound batteries dead after the three-man crew bailed out without first switching off the fire-control system—and then got killed by Ukrainian drones.
On the night of April 4, the brigade “decided to act,” according to Krym—and steal the tank. A team of sappers and tank crew sneaked back to the T-72 to clear any live explosives—including the mine underneath the tank—and install fresh batteries.
All that was left on the night of April 5 was to drive the tank a mile or two to Terny. Infantry and drone operators watched from a safe distance. Medics and an ambulance crew were on standby. The theft itself came down to two men—tankers “Baidar” and “Tenor”—who scurried to the T-72, ignoring a nearby Russian artillery barrage, and crewed the tank without switching on its headlights and giving away the heist.
Tenor, the driver, couldn’t see anything. Baidar stood in the turret, wearing night-vision goggles and taking directions by radio from nearby troops with a clearer view of the battlefield.
As the T-72 nosed into Terny, the Russians spotted it. But they couldn’t tell if the tank was driving away from them or toward them. Taking no chances, they opened fire with artillery. “The shelling was chaotic,” Krym told Butusov.
As he throttled the tank to its top speed, Tenor didn’t notice the shell crater directly ahead of him until it was too late. The T-72 toppled into the crater. The impact knocked Tenor out for three or four minutes. He awoke concussed and bleeding—but immediately began maneuvering the tank out of the crater. “They gradually managed to move out,” Krym recalled.
Soon, Tenor and Baidar were safe behind Ukrainian lines with their precious war prize. “All was fine—well, except for Tenor, who hit his head,” Krym mused.
Ukrainian intelligence snatched away the jammers for close inspection. 12th Azov Brigade crews fixed some superficial damage, including shattered glass on the first-control optics, and handed the T-72 over to Krym and the brigade’s tank battalion.
Keenly aware that most T-72B3Ms are Russian, and friendly fire is an acute risk, the tankers spray-painted “Azov” in big white letters on the side of their prize.
“Which state awards were given to Tenor and Baidar for this feat?” Butusov asked.
Krym demurred. “We applied for state awards for them,” he said. “I won’t say which in case the state decides otherwise and the lads will feel bad.” But he expressed confidence Tenor would get a promotion.
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