US soldiers drive Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles. Portal/David Mdzinarishvili/File Photo
- The US has provided Ukraine with at least 100 Bradley armored personnel carriers.
- Open source data shows that 34 of them have now been abandoned, damaged or destroyed.
- Most of the casualties apparently occurred in the early days of the Ukrainian counteroffensive.
Nearly a third of the Bradley armored vehicles the United States has provided to Ukraine may already have been lost or damaged, according to open-source data, showing just how tough and costly a drudgery Kiev’s counter-offensive against Russia is proving to be .
In January, the Biden administration announced that it would send Ukraine no fewer than 50 Bradley Fighting Vehicles, an armored personnel carrier that combines heavy firepower with the ability to transport about ten soldiers.
The New York Times reported Saturday that Ukraine’s 47th Mechanized Brigade was the only known unit to have received the vehicles. And leaked Pentagon documents from February suggest the 47th Brigade was to receive a total of 99 of them. However, other reports suggest that the United States has supplied as many as 109 of the vehicles, which first saw action on the battlefield in April.
Oryx, an open source military research group, reports that 34 Bradleys have now been visually confirmed to have been abandoned, damaged or destroyed. As insiders previously reported, more than a dozen were lost or wounded in the few days of fighting in June, when Ukraine officially announced its attempt to retake territories captured by Russia after last year’s full-scale invasion.
That means nearly a third of Bradley vehicles may already have been lost or damaged.
The losses were not unexpected and apparently concentrated in the first days of the counteroffensive, when Ukrainian soldiers attempted to traverse areas heavily mined by entrenched Russian forces. Ukrainians credit the vehicle with saving lives.
“Thanks to that, I’m standing here now,” one soldier told ABC News last month. “If we were using a Soviet armored personnel carrier, we’d probably all be dead after the first hit.”
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