Ever since Ukraine received Leopard 2 main battle tanks from its Western allies, there have been photos and videos of those tanks improved with explosive reactive armor plates surfacing in open media occasionally. It caused speculation over whether those were sporadic cases born out of Ukrainian soldiers' inventiveness or a deliberate and typical solution.
However, the recent video shared on social media might close the topic once and for all and state as a fact that additional reactive armor for Leopard 2A4 is systematic and produced en masse, basically an exclusive light-modernization made by the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
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The footage shows over twenty tanks which all wear the same tiled pattern. Presumably, the vehicles in the video belong to the 33rd Mechanized Brigade. This unit had already been seen with ERA-improved Leopards earlier this July, in photos published officially by Ukraine army's General Staff.
After all, the idea to enhance the Leopard 2A4 armor with reactive elements is logical, and other countries operating this version of the tank do the same on their part. For instance, Poland developed own modernization called Leopard 2PL, which includes an ERA kit for the turret.
Similar solutions for Leopard 2A4 were proposed by Turkish Roketsan and Greek EODH SA. Although those are more sophisticated, Ukraine, in the meantime, has no time to carry out big complex modernizations. Therefore, just putting typical plates on the hull and turret is an optimal decision.
While they visually look like Kontakt-1, this might not be the case because the same type of container is used for far more modern and effective Nizh reactive tiles of Ukrainian manufacture.
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