The “V-Hulled” Australian Truck Ukrainians Say Outlasts Every Russian RPG And Mine At The Front D
December 7th, 2024. A dust road in the Kursk Oblast on the wrong side of the Russian border for a Ukrainian paratrooper to be alive on. A driver with the call sign Tour leans into a journalist camera. He has been at the wheel of the same vehicle for a year and a half. Before this, he drove Strykers.
Before that, he drove a Soviet BTR-80. He is part of the 80th Separate Air Assault Brigade, the Lviv paratroopers who pushed across the border into Russia in August of that year, and who took their Australian trucks with them. He says one sentence on camera that becomes the spine of everything that follows. You’re driving and all you hear is ding, ding, ding and nothing else.
Just muffled explosion somewhere, meaning the armor is good. The vehicle behind him is right-hand drive, boxy, high, a V-shaped hull welded along the floor like the prow of a small boat, a remote weapon station rotating slowly on the roof. The paratroopers of the 80th Brigade call it their armored kangaroo. Ukrainian Defense Express calls it the favorite vehicle of the Air Assault forces.
Australia had been quietly retiring it. The Australian Defense Force had over 1,000 of them sitting in depots after Afghanistan and East Timor wound down. They were yesterday’s truck, a leftover from a war the West was trying to forget. Then the war Ukraine could not forget began. And a wartime president, 12 and 1/2 thousand kilometers from Canberra, asked for the Australian truck by name.
What Tour’s Brigade did with 120 of them across 3 years, from Lysychansk in 2022 to Kursk in 2024, would save Australia’s last armored vehicle production line, and force Bendigo, a country town in Victoria, to run hot again in 2026. They called it the Bushmaster. The Australian Defense Force called it surplus.
Ukraine called it a house on wheels. The story begins in a parliament, not on a battlefield. March 31, 2022. Five weeks into the full-scale invasion, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy addresses a joint sitting of the Australian Parliament by video link from Kyiv. He has already asked Washington for jets. He has already asked Berlin for tanks.
From Canberra, he asked for one specific vehicle by name. He calls it the Bushmaster. Most Australians watching the broadcast had to look it up. Within 24 hours, Prime Minister Scott Morrison agreed. Within 8 days, on April 8, 2022, the first three vehicles rolled up the ramp of a Royal Australian Air Force C-17 Globemaster at RAAF Base Amberley in Queensland.
Olive green paint, Ukrainian flag stenciled on the doors, the words “United with Ukraine” painted along the flanks in English and Ukrainian. Two of the first 20 were ambulance variants. Each C-17 sortie could carry only four. They went anyway. Its designation was the Bushmaster Protected Mobility Vehicle, built by Thales Australia at its plant in Bendigo, Victoria.
The original Project Bushranger requirement entered service in 2005. Its engineering descended from a South African idea, refined by Americans in Iraq through the MRAP program, and adapted by Australian defense industries for a country that wanted to fight in mines without dying in them. 20 more arrived in May under Defense Minister Peter Dutton.
20 more in July under the new Albanese government. 30 more in October. 30 more in July 2023. By the fifth and final tranche, Australia had gifted 120 Bushmasters to Ukraine. That was roughly 12% of the entire Australian Defense Force fleet. The technical bones of the vehicle matter because every Ukrainian operator in this story owes their life to them.
The Bushmaster weighs 15.4 tons at gross combat mass. The engine is a Caterpillar 3126 EATAAC turbocharged diesel. 300 horsepower at 2,400 revolutions per minute. Road speed 100 km/h. Range over 800 km on a single tank, meaning a Ukrainian crew can drive Kyiv to the Donbas front without refueling.
Crew capacity is 2 + 8 as designed. Ukrainian paratroopers regularly squeeze 15 to 18 men in full kit into the troop compartment. The seats hang from the roof, not the floor. The fuel and hydraulic tanks sit outside the crew area. An automatic fire suppression system is built into the hull. None of these are accidents. The defining feature is welded into the bottom, a V-shaped hull, a monocoque of steel angled like a wedge, designed to do one thing.
When a mine or an improvised explosive device detonates beneath the floor, the V splits the blast outwards, away from the crew, instead of punching the energy straight up through the spines and feet of the men inside. Thales rates the protection at STANAG 4569 level three. The NATO standard for that level is an 8-kg TNT equivalent charge detonated under the hull or wheel.
A Ukrainian driver named Serhiy told Army Inform he considered the Bushmaster able to withstand up to 8 kg of TNT from personal experience. He was speaking from inside one that had survived two RPG hits. The ballistic protection scales with applique armor. Ukrainian Bushmasters in the field carry an additional Kevlar lining bolted between the outer hull and the hanging seats.
The roof hatch takes a 5.56-mm or 7.62-mm machine gun. Many of the vehicles have been refitted with the Australian EOS R-400 remote weapon station, a 360° rotating module with day and thermal cameras, fired from inside the hull by a crewman with a joystick. The design philosophy is the inverse of the Russian one.
Russia’s BTR-82A, the GAZ Tigr M light armored car, and the Kamaz 53949 Typhoon K all sit on a flat hull. Russian doctrine prizes amphibious capability and low silhouette. The V-hull was a lesson the South Africans taught the world during the Bush Wars of the 1970s, refined by Americans in Iraq, and built into Australian doctrine before this war began.
Russia did not build vehicles for this war. Ukraine inherited one that was already ready for it. What the 80th Air Assault Brigade did with these trucks from Lysychansk in the summer of 2022 to Kursk in the winter of 2024 would force Russia’s Defense Ministry to display a burnt-out Bushmaster in Patriot Park outside Moscow.
It would also force Bendigo, a country town in Victoria, to reopen a production line Canberra had been winding down. But first, if you are enjoying this deep dive into Australian engineering, hit subscribe. It takes a second, costs nothing, and helps the channel grow. Now, the combat record. The first verified combat losses came fast.
On May 29th, 2022, the Australian Financial Review reported video confirmation of a destroyed Bushmaster at Trypillia in Donetsk Oblast. Within weeks, at least three had been lost. Crews escaped from two. The third was struck by an anti-tank weapon, and the soldiers aboard were killed. That was not the story Ukrainian chose to tell.
The story they kept telling to Army Inform, to Militarnyi, to visiting Australian senators was the story of who walked away. A soldier named Volodymyr from a Ukrainian Airborne Brigade told Army Inform in late 2022 that an 82-mm mortar mine had exploded right next to a wheel of his Bushmaster while withdrawing from Lysychansk.
Only the wheel was damaged. The crew remained alive and unharmed. His comrade Mykhailo described Grad rocket detonating 15 m from his vehicle. Wheel damaged, crew intact. He then described the same vehicle later hitting two anti-tank mines. The Bushmaster lost the wheels and the trunk. The bottom of the car withstood. The crew was shell-shocked.
All remained alive. The driver Sahip put the verdict in writing. The Bushmaster, he said, had withstood two RPG hits, and the crew had survived. He called it one of the 10 best armored vehicles in the world. In August 2022, journalist Kate Geraghty of the Sydney Morning Herald reached a commander in the 80th Brigade, identified only as Vitaly.
He had watched one of his Bushmasters get hit, drive in to rescue wounded men, and go back a second time. Then it got hit again. He gave the line that became the headline across Australia. “It is very comfortable. It has air conditioning. It is like a house on wheels. I would have lived inside.
I stay in it all the time.” That same brigade, the 80th, used Bushmasters as troop taxis through the September 2022 Kharkiv counteroffensive. They ripped into Russian-occupied territory at speeds the old MTLBs and BTRs could not match. Australian Senator David Van, visiting their positions later that year alongside Brigade Commander Colonel Ihor Skybiuk, told ABC Radio’s Drive that the paratroopers had hugged him because their friends were still alive after three Bushmasters had been hit by RPGs, a tank round, or a mine, and every soldier inside had survived, the V-hull deflecting the blast, sending the energy outwards instead of upwards. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy himself, who almost never names individual donated weapons in public, broke that rule for the Australian truck. Addressing the Lowy Institute in Sydney on October 6, 2022, he said the Bushmasters had performed masterfully in real combat operations.
By the winter of 2024, the truck Australia had been retiring was operating on Russian soil. The journalist Philip Malzahn, working for the Ukrainian state-supported outlet United 24 media, was allowed to film a crew operating inside the Kursk Oblast. The video was published on December the 7th, 2024.
Two operators, call signs only, Tur, the driver, Solodky, meaning sweet, the navigator, commander, and gun operator. Tur described the Kevlar lining tucked between the outer shell and the hanging seats. He described the troop loading. 15 to 18 men with rifles, machine guns, and empty backpacks could load and seal the rear hatch in 15 to 20 seconds.
Solodky described the EOSR 400 site day camera, night camera, cold mode for warm signatures in a hollow, warm mode for cool signatures in open ground. A tool that turned the Bushmaster into a sensor platform as well as a troop carrier. Russian forces tried to kill them. Russian Lancet loitering munitions punched shaped charges through roofs.
FPV drones dove into engine bays. Krasnopol laser-guided artillery hunted them. Tube artillery cued by Orlan drones bracketed them. Daisy-chained TM-62 mines and larger TM-83 variants overpowered the 8 kg protection threshold. The open-source intelligence collective Oryx, which counts only losses verified by photograph or video, reported as of December 2025 that 47 Ukrainian Bushmasters had been destroyed, five damaged, and three captured.
In Kursk Oblast alone, the contributor Nalsio counted five destroyed, one captured, and one abandoned by March 2025. Russia displayed one burnt-out hull as a war trophy in Patriot Park outside Moscow in August 2022. They would not have bothered if the vehicle did not matter. The Russian rivals were never built to do what the Bushmaster does.
The Kamaz Typhoon K is heavier, taller, and theoretically better protected on paper. Its combat record in Ukraine is a graveyard of burnt-out hulls along the lines around Kherson and Bakhmut. The GAZ Tigr M, Russia’s closest light protected mobility equivalent, carries a flat hull and minimal mine resistance.
Russian crews who hit TM-62 anti-tank mines in Tigr Ms have rarely walked out. The BTR-82A, an amphibious wheeled APC with a flat belly, was designed to ford rivers, not to absorb blasts from underneath. The doctrinal split is older than this war. The Soviet Union built vehicles for breakthrough operations across Central Europe.
Russia inherited the doctrine without updating it. The West, watching Rhodesia and South Africa fight in mines for two decades, and then watching American convoys die on Iraqi highways, built a different vehicle for a different war. Ukraine is fighting that war now with Russian equipment built for the other one.
What Australia gave up to send these trucks is the part of this story Canberra is still adding up. The 120 vehicles transferred represented roughly 12% of the Australian Defense Force fleet of 1,015 delivered Bushmasters. In May 2023, the Australian government signed a 160 million Australian dollar contract with Thales Australia for 78 replacement vehicles.
The stated purpose was to restore Australia’s capability after the gifts to Ukraine and to keep the Bendigo production line open. In July 2024, Canberra placed a 45 million dollar order for 15 command variant Bushmasters to support the army’s incoming HIMARS systems. In January 2025, a 100 million dollar order for 44 more vehicles for land-based maritime missile command and control.
And in April 2026, a 750 million Australian dollar order for 268 next generation Bushmasters. A contract that supports over 290 direct jobs in Bendigo through 2027 and beyond. The donation that began as charity has become an industrial strategy. The war saved Australia’s last remaining armored vehicle production line.
Total Australian military aid to Ukraine by late 2025 had exceeded 1.5 billion Australian dollars with overall assistance crossing 1.7 billion. Canberra is the largest non-NATO contributor to Ukraine’s defense. Back to Kursk. Back to Tour at the wheel, the EOS module slewing silently above him. Kevlar lining the cabin, V hull beneath his boots, 18 paratroopers in full kit waiting at a pickup point that had been Russian territory until August of that year.
He tells the camera there are no drawbacks if you have a good driver. The Bushmaster is not invincible. It is not amphibious. Its fuel consumption is not light. Spare parts come from Bendigo, a long logistical tail across two oceans. It carries no real anti-armor weapon of its own.
Ukraine’s ambassador to Australia, Vasyl Myroshnychenko, conceded in September 2022 that Ukrainian troops were using them almost as infantry fighting vehicles because they did not have anything else. The limitations are honest, so is the verdict. In Lysychansk, an 82-mm mortar exploded next to a wheel and the crew lived. In the Kharkiv counteroffensive, the 80th Brigade rode the trucks deeper than any Soviet vehicle could have taken them.
In Robotyn, the 79th Air Assault Tavria Brigade called the Australian carrier their Broniovany Kenguru, the armored kangaroo. In Kursk, Tur and Solodky used them on Russian soil with a remote weapon station scanning for thermal signatures in the snow. Australia built it for Helmand. Australia almost retired it.
Then a Ukrainian president named it in a parliament. Australian crews painted Ukrainian flags on the doors. 120 trucks flew east on C-17s to fight a war their designers never planned for. Australia called it surplus. Ukraine called it house on wheels. The V hull caught the blast. The seats held the crew.
The doors opened. The paratroopers walked out. Australia built it. Australia almost threw it away. Ukraine made it matter again.
