Ukraine’s DIY Fighting Vehicle Spews Toxic Smoke

David Axe Forbes Staff I write about ships, planes, tanks, drones, missiles and satellites. Following Oct 4, 2023, 06:18pm EDT | Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin A BMD-PRP. Via social media A strange armored vehicle, belching white smoke as it fires its autocannon, is a toxic reminder of one of the Ukrainian military’s most vexing problems.

The Ukrainians never had enough infantry fighting vehicles. And the shortage persists. The Ukrainian armed forces began Russia’s wider war on Ukraine in February 2022 with around 1,200 IFVs: most of them ex-Soviet BMP-1s .

Twenty-one months later, Russia has destroyed or captured nearly 700 of the original fighting vehicles. To make good combat losses, Ukraine has pulled potentially hundreds of old BMPs out of storage, and Kyiv’s foreign allies have pledged around 3,000 IFVs and less-well-armed armored personnel carriers. That should translate into a surplus of more than 2,000 IFVs and APCs.

Or more than 3,000 if you count the thousand or so armored trucks Ukraine also has gotten, and which the Ukrainians use as surrogate IFVs. But 3,000 extra fighting vehicles still isn’t enough. Not when the Ukrainian armed forces have roughly doubled in size over the past two years, while also getting significantly heavier.

A persistent shortage of IFVs has made the Ukrainians a bit desperate, much in the way the equally-stressed Russians—who have lost 2,500 of their 5,200 pre-war BMPs—also are getting desperate. Mixing and matching whatever chassis and turrets they can source, technicians in both Ukraine and Russia have invented whole new types of do-it-yourself IFV. The worst, on the Ukrainian side, might be the grievously underpowered BMP-1LB : a 1970s-vintage MT-LB armored tractor with a new remotely-operated gun turret.

Then there’s Ukraine’s smokey BMD-PRP hybrid: a PRP-3 artillery-observation vehicle with a BMD-2’s turret and 2A42 30-millimeter autocannon in the place of the arty vehicle’s single machine gun. The BMD-PRP first appeared in videos from the front in late 2022. Nearly a year later, we’ve seen the type in action for the first time.

A drone video of a BMD-PRP, reportedly belonging to the Ukrainian army’s 54th Mechanized Brigade , firing its autocannon at Russian forces somewhere in northeastern Ukraine. The 2A42 is smoking like it’s on fire: smoke from burned gunpowder piping from the gun’s barrel while also billowing from the one-man turret: both from the turret’s ventilator and also from the open hatch. The smoke is a health hazard for the crew.

Not only because it’s unhealthy to breathe, but also because it can give away the vehicle’s position. The unintentional smoke signal is the inevitable consequence of the particular vehicular improvisation that produced the BMD-PRP, which might weigh 13 or 14 tons and have space for five passengers and crew. The BMD’s 2A42 autocannon can fire hundreds of rounds a minute at a muzzle velocity of a thousand yards a second out to a range of more than 4,000 yards.

It’s a demolition weapon. But the gun is “far from perfect,” according to Tankograd, an authoritative source on Russian armored vehicles. “The gas-based operating system of the cannon has a rather negative influence on the accumulation of fumes in the receiver, and as the receiver is mounted in a flame-proof box that isn’t particularly air-tight, the result is that the turret is usually flooded with almost comical volumes of smoke after firing off a few dozen or so rounds.

” It’s not for no reason that 2A42 gunners often wear facemasks. “Throwing open the hatches normally solves this problem, but as the crew can hardly be expected to do that in combat, there is a powerful ventilator fan installed in the turret roof on the gunner’s side. ” Actually, the crew of the BMD-PRP in the recent video did open the hatch while in combat—an obvious risk on a battlefield teeming with small, explosives-laden drones that operators deliberately try to fly through enemy vehicles’ hatches.

But what other option did the crew have? Either risk a drone barreling through the open hatch, or risk suffocating. When you’re plugging whatever turrets you have into whatever chassis you have in a desperate effort to produce IFVs— any IFVs—to close a yawning gap between fighting-vehicle supply and demand, you might have to accept some pretty serious design compromises. Including a gun that smokes like a chimney.

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