You're reading: Ukraine enters battle for First, Third World arms markets

No military man in the world would ever confuse a Ukrainian-made T-80UD tank with a high-tech American or German tank. The T-80UD lacks state-of-the-art armor, computerized fire control and thermal optics that enable gunners to see in the dark.

On the battlefield at night, the Ukrainian tank would likely be blown apart by a western-made rival before its crew was even aware that an enemy tank was in the area.

Yet foreign armies want to buy the T-80UD. Even as Ukraine's industrial sector continues to decline, the tanks are steadily rolling off the line at the Malyshev plant in Kharkiv.

Developing countries are seeking the T-80UD because it costs far less than a western tank, and is very often better than any tank in their arsenal. The same marketing principles of low price and middle-range quality apply to a host of other Ukrainian weapons that are ideally suited for the armed forces of Third World countries.

Ukraine is even attracting Western attention as a source of low-cost military hardware. Germany has formally expressed interest in acquiring a new Ukrainian-Russian small military transport aircraft for NATO.

Ukraine has more arms to offer, both big and small. One day soon, Ukrainian pistols and bullet-proof vests may be standard issue for soldiers and policemen not only in the developing world, but in the West as well.

On the strength of over $1 billion in foreign weapons contracts, Ukraine ranked as the world's 20th largest arms seller in 1997, according to the British-based defense information group Jane's. The country ranked 30th in 1996.

Ultimately, the weapons industry stands to be a hugely important money spinner for Ukraine, and a driving force for economic recovery.
Thanks to tanks

Ukraine's weapons industry is a powerful remnant of the Soviet-era, when countless factories belonged to the enormous industrial complex that kept the Red Army in the field and the Red Navy deployed at sea. The T-80UD is a direct descendant of the Soviet T-80 tank, which in turn is a descendant of the famous T-34.

It was the T-34 – built according to Soviet principles of lost-cost and technical simplicity – that in large numbers overwhelmed technically superior German Panzer and Tiger tanks during World War II. Today, the T-80UD offers its crew less comfort than western tank, and requires more maintenance time. Although better armed against cannon shells than its Soviet-era predecessors, it remains vulnerable to shaped charge explosives on missile tips.

But those problems are of little concern to the classic T-80UD customer: a developing country. For many of them, the T-80UD represents a cost-effective upgrade which can destroy with ease Soviet or NATO tanks built in the 1970s and 1980s vintage.

Pakistan was the first customer, shelling out $650 million for 320 tanks. Next target for Malyshev salesmen: Turkey, which wants to overhaul its tank fleet.

Malyshev salesmen are hard at work pitching for a sale of 1,000 tanks for $2 billion. The Ukrainian option is a very real one for NATO-member Turkey.

The American tank alternative is the M1A1, manufactured by the Chrysler corporation and selling for $5.5 million a unit, about double the cost of a T-80UD.

For the Turks, cost is not the only potential problem with the M1A1: there is the possibility that the U.S. Congress might tie tank deliveries to Turkey's grim human rights record. The Ukrainian Parliament would be highly unlikely to even consider such a measure.

As for technology, if the Turks wait several months or perhaps longer, the Malyshev plant may be able to supply T-80UDs with high-tech night vision equipment. French thermal gear is currently being tested on Ukrainian tank chasses.

Paul Beaver, a spokesman for the British-based defense information publishing group Jane's, said 'I'd rank Ukraine 20th in terms of arms exports by revenue, more than $one billion last year. Ukraine has a lot of Soviet-era factories which are producing armored fighting vehicles much cheaper than anywhere else. Production costs are probably an eighth of those in western Europe.'

The list of potential customers includes Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic, for Warsaw Pact members scheduled to join NATO next year. Armed with NATO funding, the three countries may opt for low-cost T-80UDs similar in design to the 1,600 Soviet-era tanks they currently field.
Post-Soviet peculiarities

Many recent Ukrainian weapons innovations have been borne of necessity, and it has been Soviet-trained weapons engineers who have been delivering the goods.

When Kyiv announced in 1993 that it would honor a Soviet-era contract to sell T-80s to Pakistan, tank cannon were not something the newly independent Ukraine made. As it turned out, Russia, which made the part in Soviet times, expressed no interest in helping Ukraine become arms exporting power.

Ukrainian engineers took up the complex task of building a tank-mounted cannon cable of accurately firing a 30 kg depleted uranium dart up to three kilometers. In March 1997 they crowned their effort by inviting foreign observers to attend a demonstration in Kharkiv in which T-80UDs fired Soviet ammunition out of wholly Ukrainian-made 125 mm cannon.

'One can safely assert that our cannon is better than the Russian gun by a factor of 1.6.' said Oleksandr Pavlenko, spokesman for Minprompolitik, a defense industry bureau specializing in artillery and small arms development.

Minprompolitik engineers have branched out in several directions in pursuing their mandate of designing weapons made of entirely Ukrainian components for a low-budget Ukrainian army. The results of their labors include an $80 revolver, a jeep-mounted anti-aircraft rocket launcher, and a titanium-alloy mortar of a third the weight of its NATO counterpart.

But as with the tank cannon, Minprompolitik-designed equipment is precisely the affordable and rugged weaponry the militaries of the developing world are seeking.

'There are probably 16,000 Soviet-made tanks in the world today,' Pavlenko estimated. 'Every one of them will eventually need upgrading…and we make the equipment to do that.'
A cottage arms industry

Across Ukraine, many other Soviet-era institutes have found salvation in arms innovation. At the I.N. Frantseevich Institute of Problems of Material Science outside of Kyiv, for example, technicians consider their Frantseevich bullet-proof vest a top-of-the-line 21st century product.

Senior engineer Aleksandr Tchetchel said that with two layers of woven ceramic fiber, the Frantseevich vest is far more flexible and weighs a bit less than its U.S. military counterpart, the Kevlar vest. He shows off a Frantseevich vest that has been hit with a Kalashnikov 5.45 mm bullet: the first layer has a hole in it, but there is no exit hole in the second layer, indicating that the slug bounced off the vest.

'Our vest will stop military velocity bullets,' Tchetchel said. 'Kevlar won't.'

The U.S. military puts additional kevlar plating into pockets to make its vests impervious to automatic rifle fire. But that boosts the weight of the vest to an unwieldy 8 kg and jacks up the price to around $800. By comparison, the less bulky Frantseevich vest costs $700.

Ukraine has also gone it alone in pistols. By the end of this year, every Ukrainian policeman will have received a brand new sidearm, wholly manufactured at the Vinnytsya-based Fort weapons factory.

Fort was once one of several factories across the USSR cranking out the Tokarev and Makarov 9mm pistols.

The new automatic pistol uses only Ukrainian parts, and is better than the Soviet-era guns it replaces, its engineers say.

'The FORT-12 is more reliable,' said Spetstekhnika State Engineering Promotion Center technician Volodymyr Mikhailov. 'But more importantly, we rebuilt the weapon so it can accept a Parabellum 9 mm. round.'

By no coincidence, Parabellum 9 mm cartridges are NATO standard and a favorite sidearm ammunition throughout the world.

'This way the weapon becomes marketable outside the country,' said Mikhailov. 'Exports are the only real source of income right now.'
Adjustments on the fly

The self-sufficient, low-cost weapons-building strategy has its limits. In order for Ukraine's military aerospace industry to reach out the world, it has had to attract foreign parts and partners.

The domestic lack of certain technologies and materials has played a part in the strategy. But equally, defense planners have realized that the foreign customers for low-tech Ukrainian tanks are different than the foreign customers for high-tech Ukrainian military cargo aircraft, missiles and satellite-launching rockets.

Ukraine has shared development costs with Russia, the U.S. and other countries in the Sea Launch commercial satellite launching project, which seeks to gainfully employ former Soviet rocket and missile specialists. The program has kept several ex-Soviet defense plants from closing.

Ukraine and Russia, meanwhile, have jointly developed the huge Antonov cargo turboprop AN-70. The aircraft remains in the testing phase, with the two ex-Soviet states eager to attract western partners such as Airbus, Daimler-Benz Aerospace, and British Aerospace.

More promising is the AN-140, a Ukrainian-Russian 52-seat turoboprop that has won accaim at western airshows. The low-cost, low-maintenance plane is designed to transport a platoon of soldiers from one small airfield to another.

Developed by the Antonov design bureau outside Kyiv together with the aircraft plant in the Russian city of Samara, the important bits of the AN-140 – airframe, electronics, and engine – are Ukrainian. At $6.5 million per aircraft, the AN-140 comes at a bargain price. The Germans and other westerners are taking a serious look.