A Tank Wrecked Ukraine's Razor Wire. So The Ukrainians Sent In Robots.

Forbes

30-03-2025

The immobilized T-90M.
An overconfident, flag-waving Russian assault outside Pokrovsk on Thursday left behind ruined Russian vehicles and at least one smoldering corpse. It also wrecked a razor-wire barrier Ukrainian forces had erected to slow down Russian attacks.
As one Ukrainian blogger pointed out, the Ukrainians swiftly repaired the barrier breach—apparently by deploying one of their razor-wire-hauling ground robots.
The Thursday assault was an outlier. Short of purpose-made armored vehicles, Russian regiments increasingly attack on foot or in civilian vehicles. But the Kremlin is trying to restore momentum to its faltering assault on the fortress city of Pokrovsk—and marshalled a dozen armored vehicles including at least one modern T-90M tank.
But the armored attack ran into a wall of Ukrainian artillery and drones—and a mass of flesh-shredding, vehicle-entangling razor wire. The assault was 'unnecessary confirmation of the offensive weakness of the Russians,' a second Ukrainian blogger noted.
A Ukrainian ground robot lays razor wire.
The T-90, apparently damaged, its crew either dead or about to bail out, rolled through the wire before grinding to a halt. Overnight on Thursday, someone—or something—repaired the gap in the wire. A Ukrainian aerial drone survey the following morning depicted a fresh stretch of wire around the tank.
Special Kherson Cat, who blogs from southern Ukraine, speculated that a Ukrainian unmanned ground vehicle laid the fresh wire, taking over an especially dangerous task that once fell to specially trained sappers.
It's possible. Many Ukrainian brigades deploy radio-controlled UGVs for the riskiest engineering tasks. 'It makes it much easier to work in all areas,' a trooper from the 93rd Mechanized Brigade explained in an official video.
The wire-laying robots are simple tracked vehicles with a bed in the back for a thick coil of wire. Carefully driven to the front line by a remote operator seeing what the 'bot's own front-facing camera sees, the UGV hooks the end of the coil onto existing wire—and then unspools the rest of the coil.
If the Russians spot the 'bot and destroy it, it's no big deal. 'It's better to fuck up a robot,' another 93rd Mechanized Brigade soldier mused.