Ukraine’s Swedish-made CV90 combat vehicles are intended to hunt enemy armor in the forest
The Swedish government announced on Thursday that it will donate up to 50 CV90 infantry fighting vehicles to Ukraine as well as some of Sweden’s mobile howitzers.
It is the latest in a plethora of weapon packs from Ukraine’s NATO allies. Sweden, together with Finland, began the slow process of joining the transatlantic alliance last year.
The weapons that Ukraine’s allies have promised in recent months do not do it includes many thoughts—although that may soon change. But they do includes many heavily armed infantry fighting vehicles such as, while not tanksstill possess significant armor protection capability.
The US is sending to Ukraine a first batch of 50 combat-proven M-2 combat vehicles, long range tank killer. The Swedish CV90s, on the other hand, are skilled at destroying armored vehicles at close up– and especially in the forest.
The tracked, three-crew CV90, built by the Swedish companies Hägglunds and Bofors, weighs up to 37 tons. In its standard version, it carries up to eight infantrymen and packs a 40-millimeter autocannon in an armored turret. – It is one of Sweden’s best combat vehicles, says Sweden’s Minister of Energy and Industry Ebba Busch stated.
The CV90 is popular in Northern Europe. The Swedish army has 500 CV90s in several variants. The armies of Switzerland, Norway, the Netherlands, Finland, Estonia and Denmark also operate CV90s.
It’s not hard to see why. The CV90’s designers optimized the vehicle for operation in the forests of Scandinavia. It just so happens that eastern Ukraine, where much of the fighting is, also has lots of trees.
Consider the CV90’s main weapon – its 40-millimeter L/70 autocannon. L/70 is not new. It was first used, as an anti-aircraft gun, a few years after the Second World War. But it is proven extremely sustainable and versatile. An L/70 can fire two-pound shells up to five rounds per second with an initial velocity of one thousand yards per second.
That’s a lot of metal moving very fast. Up close, the L/70 is like a chainsaw—especially when firing armor-piercing fin-stabilized throwing sabot, or APFSDS-T, rounds.
And that is the key to the CV90’s anti-armor capability. It is true that the CV90 does not have a turret-mounted launcher for long-range anti-tank missiles like the American M-2 and Russian BMP fighting vehicles do. But you don’t need one when fighting in forest terrain.
Yes, the M-2 can fire a 50-pound TOW anti-tank missile to a distance of two miles. But only under the right conditions. The missile requires a clear line of sight between the launcher and the target – both to allow the gunner to control the missile via a deploying wire and to prevent the missile from running into an obstacle and detonating prematurely.
The BMP-3’s 60-pound Kornet anti-tank missile travels even further—up to five miles—but it’s a beam-riding weapon that also requires a clear line of sight for its guidance laser.
All that said, anti-tank missiles like TOW and Kornet don’t work very well in the woods, where there are a lot of obstacles. L/70, on the other hand, has nothing against the forest at all. Not when it’s spewing sabot rounds at a rate of several per second.
In 2011, Swedish Army Major Magnus Frykvall ran a simulation where a reinforced Swedish Army battalion equipped with CV90s and Leopard 2 tanks was pitted against a Russian brigade with BMP-3 combat vehicles and T-90 tanks.
The wooded battlefield was bad for tanks, and both sides lost 10 or a dozen Leopard 2s or T-90s. However, when the two sides’ infantry fighting vehicles clashed in the forest, the CV90s proved to be far superior to the BMPs.
“The red side’s IFVs had difficulty using their anti-tank missiles effectively, while the blue side’s CV90’s 40-millimeter autocannon with APFSDS-T ammunition is very effective in this terrain,” Frykvall wrote. The Swedish force wrote off 48 CV90. But the Russian force lost a staggering 81 BMPs.
The meaning is clear. To make the best use of their ex-Swedish CV90s, the Ukrainian army should deploy them in the east, where they can hunt down Russian vehicles in the forest.