Ukraine Aims To Cut Off Russian Troops In Crimea. Kyiv’s New Snow-Tractors Could Make It Possible.

A BV-type vehicle in U.S. Army service in 1987.

Wikimedia Commons

It’s not for no reason that the German government has pledged to Ukraine scores of BV-206 all-terrain snow-vehicles. The lightweight, low-pressure tractors, which work as well on marshland as they do on snow, presumably were on the Ukrainian government’s wish-list as the government put the finishing touches on plans for its 2023 counteroffensive, which might be imminent.

The 4.5-ton BV-206 with its 130-horsepower gasoline engine and 17-person capacity comes from a long line of all-terrain transports, designed by Swedish firm Hägglunds, that has helped armies to haul people and supplies across some truly unforgiving, roadless battlefields. The Falklands, for instance.

The Ukrainian army could make good use of the 64 BV-206s Berlin has pledged—in southern Ukraine’s Kherson Oblast. Specifically, along the land corridor to Russian-occupied Crimea.

Russian forces seized Crimea in early 2014 in a violent prelude to the invasion of eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region, itself a prelude to Russia’s wider war on Ukraine that began 15 months ago in February 2022.

The Russians are keen to hold onto Crimea with its strategic naval base and airfields. The Ukrainians are keen to liberate the peninsula as part of a broader effort to restore Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders. For the Russians, keeping Crimea means preserving the supply lines into the peninsula. For the Ukrainians, liberating Crimea means cutting those same supply lines.

Kicking the Russians out of Crimea—or even threatening to do so—could bend the trajectory of the 15-month wider war, in the Ukrainians’ favor. “If they can get to the point of beginning to isolate Crimea, I think that changes the dynamics very, very substantially,” David Petraeus, the retired U.S. Army general, told an audience on June 2.

Ukraine’s BV-206s could be a critical factor in deciding how a possible fight over Crimea ends. The lightweight vehicles can supply combat brigades without relying on paved roads. That’s especially important in southern Kherson Oblast just north of Crimea.

People and supplies travel from Russia to Crimea one of four ways: by air; by sea to Sevastopol or one of the peninsula’s other ports; by road and rail across the Kerch Bridge; or by rail via Russian-occupied Melitopol.

Each method of supply is vulnerable to Ukrainian intervention. The Ukrainian military’s new American-made Patriot surface-to-air missiles, firing from just inside Ukrainian lines, can strike aircraft across much of Crimea. Ukraine’s explosives-laden drone boats routinely hit Russian ships in Crimean ports. Ukrainian saboteurs blew up and badly damaged the Kerch Bridge back in October; the span still is under repair.

The railway from the port of Melitopol to Crimea might be the most important line of communication for the peninsula—and Ukraine’s main target in any possible counteroffensive aimed at setting conditions for Crimea’s eventual liberation.

As it happens, a paved road runs from north to south from the left bank of the wide Dnipro River to the Black Sea just east of Kherson city. This road, the P47, bisects the main rail line that threads west from Melitopol along the E105 road and turns south into Crimea. Control the P47, and you control the best supply line into the peninsula.

The Ukrainians know this. But the Russians do, too. Russian forces have spent months digging in along the P47. If you travel along the road today, you’ll run into a defensive position every few miles. This makes the P47 a tough target for Ukrainian battalions rolling south from the Dnipro’s right bank.

But for Kyiv, there’s a better way to sever that railway from Melitopol. The Ukrainians could attack south while avoiding the P47.

The problem, of course, is that a paved road is the best line of communication for an attacker as well as for a defender. If Ukrainian forces bypass the P47, they’ll need to move supplies from Kherson to the front-line battalions across southern Ukraine’s roadless marshes.

No vehicle is better suited to that thankless task than the BV-206 is. The tractor’s 1970s predecessor, the BV-202, kept Royal Marines supplied during their brutal foot march across the Falklands in 1982. The British Army later deployed BVS-10s to Afghanistan to maintain supply lines over unpaved mountains and valleys. Every couple of decades or so, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps buy a fresh batch of the latest BV-type vehicle for Arctic operations.

The BV-206 works. With it and other lightweight vehicle types shuttling supplies, the Ukrainians could march a brigade south from Kherson without tethering that brigade to the P47.

If the local Russian garrison failed to match the Ukrainians’ off-road logistics, there would be very little preventing the attacking forces from rolling all the way to the Black Sea—and severing the railway to Crimea.

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