Russian forces have destroyed another Ukrainian US-made M1 Abrams tank and an M2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicle in Donbass, the Defense Ministry has said, as quoted by TASS.
In a statement to the agency on Saturday, the ministry said that both vehicles had been taken out in the Avdeevka sector of the front. The strategic city was liberated by Russia in February.
Officials told TASS that the Abrams was hit by a high-precision guided Krasnopol artillery shell fired by troops from the ‘Center’ group of forces, adding that the Bradley was destroyed by a kamikaze drone.
The Krasnopol shell was launched from an Msta-S self-propelled howitzer, with the projectile guided by a reconnaissance drone, according to the statement.
A video shared by several media outlets shows the Russian Msta-S firing from a well-covered position in the woods, with part of the clip filmed from a drone showing an explosion near a barely visible armored vehicle, apparently the Abrams. A close-up from the drone shows the tank being hit on the side, with a plume of smoke rising around the impact area.
Another video published by the media shows a Russian soldier operating a drone, which crashes head-on into a US-made Bradley on a country road.
The US agreed to send a total of 31 Abrams tanks to Ukraine in January 2023, with the batch arriving that autumn. The Russian Defense Ministry reported the destruction of several of the vehicles, one of which was displayed in Moscow last month as part of a trophy show.
In late April this year, Ukraine reportedly pulled back its Abrams tanks from the front because Russian drone strikes were making their battlefield operations much more difficult. At the time, AP estimated that Kiev had lost a total of five Abrams.
Ukraine also received around 200 Bradleys, around a third of which had been destroyed, abandoned, damaged, or captured by March, according to data from open-source military intelligence site Oryx.