Kuwaiti М-84AB Tanks Heading to Croatia

Kuwaiti М-84AB main battle tanks made in Yugoslavia are heading to Croatia.

This was reported by Andrii Tarasenko, the Ukrainian researcher on armored vehicles.

Tarasenko released a photo taken in the Slovenian city of Ljubljana, which shows М-84 in desert camouflage.

According to the Serbian media TV Front, tanks are sent to the facility of the Croatian holding company Đuro Đaković, and then, probably, after repair and modernization, they will go to Ukraine. However, it is important to note that there are no official reports confirming this information.

The media states that Kuwaiti authorities began to consider transferring М-84AB tanks after the death of the Emir of Kuwait, Sheikh Nawaf al-Ahmad al-Jaber al-Sabah.

TV Front does not exclude the possibility that the Ukrainian arsenal can be replenished by Croatian М-84, which will be replaced by German-made Leopard 2A4 tanks.

Kuwaiti М-84AB

M-84 is a Yugoslav version of the Soviet Т-72 tank, production of which began in the mid-1980s.

It was used in the Yugoslav army, and after the collapse of Yugoslavia, these tanks ended up in the arsenals of Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. According to some estimates, the Yugoslav industry produced about 700 tanks in total.

M-84AB is a special version of the M-84 that was being developed for the Kuwaiti military.

Kuwait ordered 200 tanks in 1989. The contract also included 15 command and 15 armoured recovery vehicles.

By the beginning of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, approximately 15 M-84 tanks had been delivered, while the remaining tanks were supplied to the remnants of the Kuwaiti army located in Saudi Arabia.

As of 2022, it is known that Kuwait has about 149 tanks, some of which are in storage, and the role of a “workhorse” of Kuwaiti tankers has passed to M1A2 tanks, of which there are about 210 in service.