Ukrainian soldiers, engineers add metal netting to US tanks and vehicles to protect against Russian drones

KYIV, Ukraine -- As Russia wages a protracted war of attrition, the Ukrainian military says it has made the most of the U.S. supplied Abrams tanks and Bradley armored vehicles.

As the vast use of drones has become a feature of the Ukrainian-Russian war, soldiers and engineers said they have found a new way to make their most precious vehicles even more protected and efficient on the battlefield. Videos posted on social media appeared to demonstrate how the vehicles and their crews survived on densely mined fields.

“Bradley is the best vehicle I’ve ever driven,” Oleksandr Shyrshyn, a soldier with the elite 47th Mechanized Brigade, told ABC News. “It’s precise, it’s safe, it’s super cool. Given the number of impacts on the battlefields, if we were still using our old IFV-1 or IFV-2, the losses [would have been] two or three times higher.”

U.S. officials said in 2023 they would send 31 Abrams tanks to Ukraine. More than 100 Bradley vehicles have also been shipped to Ukraine to aid in its fight against Russia, the White House said.

But as the brigade’s soldiers continued fighting, they said, they understood they needed to upgrade the machine.

“Most injuries and damage happen during boarding and disembarking of the crew or from the FPV and other drones,” Shyrshyn said, referring to commonly used first-person-view drones. "We can’t do anything about the first factor, but we can offset the second one with a metal net."

The latest additions are meant to protect against modern drone technology, but such modifications have long been common, said Mick Mulroy, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, retired CIA officer and U.S. Marine, and ABC News national security and defense analyst.

"Throughout history tanks and tankers have used add ons to try to defend against all of these anti-tank devices," Mulroy said. "Mesh, reactive armor, even chain linked fences, have been used."

The area where Shyrshyn’s unit is operating has been the hotspot of the eastern front-line in the past couple of weeks, according to the reports of the Ukrainian General Staff. In the past few days the Russian troops advanced by several kilometers. Shyrshyn said his soldiers are exhausted, needed more vehicles and were trying to keep those they have.

A Ukrainian steel manufacturer has designed specialized steel screens, which they said are installed on top of the active armor. According to Shyrshyn, the screens have raised the survival rate of the crew and saved the vehicle from first-person-view drones used by Russia.

It takes a week to produce one steel screen and around 12 hours to install it, said Oleksandr Myronenko, COO of Metinvest Group, a Ukrainian steel manufacturer. The non-commercial project is part of a Steel Front, a military initiative run by Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s richest businessman.

An engineer with 20 years of experience, Shyrshyn said he had to turn into a military goods specialist overnight.

“We started the project on day one of the invasion,” he said. “From Monday to Friday, I do my regular work. On weekends I go to the east to oversee what we do for the troops.”

Among the other non-commercial projects within the Steel Front military initiative are production of anti-tank hedgehogs, body armor and a few innovative things like fortifications built in the areas of the most intense fighting in the east, and even an underground field hospital.

While the Bradleys have just started testing their bespoke steel screens, Abrams tanks have been driving in it for a few months already. Ukrainian troops started using them in February this year near Stepove, Avdiivka and Berdychiv in the east.

”Near the latter we understood what was off. A very precise and cheap FPV drone can easily hit and block the tanks turret, for example, and that’s it, doesn’t matter how great the vehicle is,” Shyrshyn told ABC. “The drone threat is even bigger given that the tank is quite big and is not the easiest thing to camouflage.”

Besides, Shyrshyn said, Abrams tanks are best at defeating other vehicles, since they fire armor-piercing projectiles, not highly explosive ones. And most of the fighting Abrams were used in took place among the buildings and in the forests, places where usually infantry troops hide using the drones, he said.

Steel screens have apparently solved the problem for now, repelling these small but painful weapons, he said.

”We basically took a NATO standards manual and adjusted it,” Myronenko, from Metivest, said.

"Now we see that we could have avoided losses we had suffered before,” Shyrshyn said. “I saw this tank during the training in Germany for the first time and I was really really excited. I wish at least one third of all our brigades had them. We really need more, otherwise we have to pull”.

Mulroy, the ABC News analyst and a former Tanker and Infantry Marine, said tanks and other armoured vehicles have long been targeted by less-expensive lethal countermeasures, like portable rockets and missiles -- and now drones. The additions Ukrainians are making are similar to what he's seen in the past.

"In my experience, these efforts are effective," he said. "If is likely if they are emplacing them across their fleet of tanks, they have proven their worth."