From Tank to Drone Hunter: Rheinmetall, Ukraine and the Leopard 1 Skyranger 35

11/03/2026
By Defense.info

A Leopard 1 was designed in the 1960s to fight Soviet armored columns on the North German Plain. Today, some of those hulls are being stripped of their 105mm turrets and refitted as something their designers never imagined: radar-guided, networked air defense vehicles built to kill drones and cruise missiles over Ukraine.

The Leopard 1 Skyranger 35 is a small program by the standards of the war. But it is a useful marker of how the war in Ukraine is reshaping European thinking about air defense, industrial capacity and the value of legacy platforms. It shows that what matters in the drone age is not only the next new platform but the ability to take existing assets, combine them with new sensors and effectors, and get them into the fight quickly. That is a lesson for European armies preparing for their own drone war, not just for Ukraine.

What Rheinmetall Has Built

The concept is simple. Rheinmetall removes the original Leopard 1 turret and replaces it with its unmanned Skyranger 35 turret. According to Rheinmetall’s October 2025 press release, the turret carries a KDG 35/1000 revolver cannon in 35x228mm caliber, firing 1,000 rounds per minute with an effective range of up to 4,000 meters. The gun has a high degree of commonality with the Oerlikon Revolver Gun Mk 3, is airburst-capable through Rheinmetall’s AHEAD technology, and the company says the system will also be able to carry modern guided missiles in future.

The sensor suite is what turns an old tank hull into a modern air defense node. Army Recognition describes an S-band AESA multi-mission radar with five fixed antenna panels giving continuous 360-degree coverage, optimized for small drones, low-flying aircraft and rocket and artillery projectiles. It is paired with Rheinmetall’s FIRST passive infrared search-and-track system and an electro-optical package. The turret holds 252 ready-to-fire rounds. Critically, the vehicle can detect and track targets passively and switch on its radar only when needed, a significant survivability feature on a battlefield where any emitter invites a strike.

Kyiv Post reported that the AMMR radar can detect aerial targets out to 20 kilometers, while the FIRST passive system can identify small targets out to 5 kilometers without emitting. The same report noted the cannon can fire single shots, rapid single shots at 200 rounds per minute, or full bursts at 1,000 rounds per minute, and the turret can elevate to 85 degrees.

The ammunition is the heart of the system. AHEAD rounds are programmed by the gun as they leave the barrel to burst at a calculated point ahead of the target. RealClearDefense notes each round releases 152 tungsten pellets into the target’s path. In its own account of its support to Kyiv, Rheinmetall stresses two points that matter in Ukraine: gun-based defense is cheaper per engagement than many missile-based solutions, and electronic countermeasures cannot alter the trajectory of AHEAD projectiles once they are fired.

From Concept to Combat

The program moved from idea to operational service in roughly two years.

In June 2024, Björn Bernhard, head of Rheinmetall’s land systems business, floated the idea publicly. Ukrainska Pravda reported his comment that there were many Leopard 1 tanks on which Rheinmetall could mount the Skyranger turret with its 35mm automatic cannon. At that point, Militarnyi reported, Bernhard described the idea as not yet a top priority, with the immediate focus on refurbishing tanks for transfer to Ukraine.

By September 2024, a demonstrator existed. At Rheinmetall’s Skyranger System Demonstration on September 18, 2024, the company showed a Leopard 1A5BE-based vehicle with the Skyranger 35 turret. United24 reported that a company spokesperson said it was built to show that the turret could be adapted to different chassis, and that the effort was designed with the Ukrainian Armed Forces in mind.

The contract followed on October 10, 2025. Rheinmetall announced an order worth a “three-digit million Euro” sum, financed by an unnamed EU country through proceeds from frozen Russian assets, with production and integration handled by Rheinmetall Italia SpA in Rome. CEO Armin Papperger said the company was “grateful for the trust that Ukraine has placed in us.” Notably, the release spoke of “further” Skyranger 35 systems, implying an earlier tranche.

At Rheinmetall’s Capital Markets Day on November 18, 2025, Papperger told investors the first Leopard 1-based Skyranger 35 had left the factory and was expected in Ukraine the following week, according to Army Recognition.

Then the program went quiet. It resurfaced publicly on September 3, 2026, when Ukraine’s 1020th Anti-Aircraft Missile and Artillery Regiment released footage of the vehicle in action. United24 reported that Defense Express assessed the footage, with bare trees and crews in cold-weather uniforms, as recorded no later than around March 2026, meaning the system had likely been operating for months before anyone acknowledged it. A commander with the call sign “Timati” said his unit was “among the first” to receive the system and compared operating it to working aboard a “spaceship.” Rheinmetall itself confirmed in September 2026 that the Skyranger 35 on Leopard 1 has been supplied to Ukraine.

The number of vehicles remains undisclosed. That quiet approach to delivery is itself telling. Air defense assets are high-value targets, and Kyiv has every reason not to advertise how many it has or where they are.

Why a Gun, and Why Now

The Leopard 1 Skyranger arrives at a moment when the air threat to Ukraine is changing in ways that favor gun systems.

The scale of the Russian drone campaign is extraordinary. The Institute for Science and International Security counted 6,462 Shahed-type and related drones launched in March 2026, averaging 208 per day, with a record 948 Shahed-type drones plus 35 missiles launched in a single 24-hour period on March 23–24. Frontliner reported that May 2026 set a new record of 8,150 Russian drones launched in one month.

Ukraine answered the piston-engine Shahed with an innovative cheap layer: interceptor drones. Euromaidan Press reported that Ukrainian interceptor drones destroyed more than 33,000 Russian drones of all types in March 2026 alone.

Russia’s response has been speed. Reuters reported that Russia launched about 450 drones flying at 240 to 500 km/h in June 2026 and about 2,850 in August, and that Ukrainian intelligence estimates Russia now produces roughly 3,000 jet-powered drones a month. Interceptor drones that cost under $2,000 and worked well against slower Shaheds “cannot keep up,” and Ukraine’s limited stocks of Western interceptor missiles were never designed to counter massed jet-drone raids. Maksym Zhorin, deputy commander of Ukraine’s 3rd Army Corps, put it bluntly: “With the jet drones, we completely screwed up the initiative again.”

This is where a radar-cued 35mm gun earns its place. A cannon with programmable airburst rounds does not need to chase a target; it needs to put a cloud of tungsten in front of it. Rheinmetall’s guns already have a combat record against fast targets in Ukraine. United24 cited Ukraine’s Western Air Command reporting that a single Skynex system destroyed 12 aerial targets in one battle, one cruise missile and 11 Shahed-type drones, and referenced July 2026 footage of a Skynex downing a Kalibr cruise missile with 35mm AHEAD rounds. The Skyranger 35 uses the same ammunition family.

None of this makes the gun a silver bullet. A 4-kilometer engagement envelope means each vehicle defends a point or a small area, not a region. Army Recognition puts the coverage at roughly four by four kilometers per system. But that is precisely the right size for defending a power substation, a bridge, a logistics hub or a command post, the targets that Russia’s campaign against energy and transport infrastructure has prioritized.

Building on the Gepard Legacy

The Leopard 1 Skyranger is, in effect, a next-generation Gepard, as David Axe wrote in Euromaidan Press. The lineage is literal. The Gepard was itself built on a Leopard 1 chassis, and it has been one of the surprise successes of the war. Rheinmetall notes that Gepard has been in Ukrainian service since summer 2022 and has proved an effective and cost-efficient means of protecting critical infrastructure against drones, with Rheinmetall supplying hundreds of thousands of 35mm rounds for it.

That continuity matters operationally. According to Army Recognition, Gepard, Skynex and Skyranger 35 share the same Rheinmetall 35mm ammunition family, similar training pathways and related supply chains. Ukraine is not absorbing an entirely new system; it is extending a gun-based air defense ecosystem it already knows. The Leopard 1 hull adds another layer of familiarity, since Ukraine already operates and maintains Leopard 1A5 tanks.

The difference is generational. Gepard is a crewed turret with 1970s-era sensors. Skyranger is unmanned, uses an AESA radar and passive infrared tracking, and is designed to plug into a wider command-and-control network rather than fight alone. It can operate autonomously around a defended site or feed a common operational picture, filling the gap between medium-range surface-to-air missiles and shoulder-fired MANPADS.

The Industrial Model

The way the vehicle is built may be as important as what it does.

First, it uses hulls that already exist. RealClearDefense reports that Rheinmetall is drawing dormant Leopard 1 hulls from its own European storage and from Flensburger Fahrzeugbau Gesellschaft, rather than from Ukraine’s frontline tank fleet. Euromaidan Press notes that Rheinmetall held 88 Leopard 1s in 2022 and bought 50 more from Belgium’s OIP Land Systems in 2023, while FFG held 99, and cites French historian Stevius’s conclusion that “the stocks in Europe are far from exhausted.” There are limits: some hulls are too rusted or worn to use. But the basic point holds. Europe has a reservoir of tracked chassis that can be converted far faster than new vehicles can be built.

Second, it is a European production network, not a single national line. The turret integration is done in Rome by Rheinmetall Italia, the hulls come from German and Belgian stocks, and the financing comes from another EU state using frozen Russian asset proceeds. That combination of distributed industry and innovative financing is the kind of model European defense planners have long discussed but rarely executed at speed.

Third, Ukraine received the system before Germany’s own army. Euromaidan Press observes that Ukraine’s Skyrangers arrived first, while the Bundeswehr’s own program is still ramping up. Germany has ordered 19 Boxer-based Skyranger 30 vehicles, with the Bundeswehr stating they will arrive by 2028 under a framework contract for up to 49. Rheinmetall says it will expand annual production from around 70–100 turrets to as many as 400. In effect, Ukraine is serving as the combat proving ground for a system family that Europe intends to field in large numbers.

Part of a Broader Leopard 1 Rethink

The Skyranger conversion is one of two parallel efforts to give the Leopard 1 new life. Euromaidan Press reports that Ukraine has also contracted Belgium’s John Cockerill Defense for 30 C3105 unmanned turrets, plus one test turret, to re-arm Leopard 1A5s as gun tanks. The crew moves into the hull, an autoloader replaces the loader, the aluminum turret saves three tons for added protection or electronic warfare equipment, and the gun elevates to 42 degrees for indirect fire out to 10 kilometers. That program is not expected to yield a combat-ready battalion until 2027.

Both programs reflect the same logic. In its original form, the Leopard 1A5 is badly exposed on the modern battlefield. RealClearDefense notes its 10mm to 70mm of steel armor and four-person turret leave it vulnerable to FPV drones and modern anti-tank missiles. Euromaidan Press counts at least 30 of Ukraine’s roughly 135 fielded Leopard 1A5s destroyed. Instead of treating the hull as obsolete, both conversions treat it as a mobile, protected carrier for a new mission system. The value is in the chassis’s mobility, availability and maintainability, not in its original turret.

Lessons for European and Allied Forces

Several lessons follow for European and allied militaries.

The first is that close-in air defense is now a mass requirement. Russia’s ability to field thousands of drones a month means defenders need many shooters, not a few exquisite ones. Gun systems with cheap programmable ammunition are one of the few ways to make the cost-exchange ratio work, and they hold value as missile stockpiles run short.

The second is that layering is everything. Skyranger does not replace interceptor drones, electronic warfare, MANPADS or medium-range missiles. It fills a specific layer: the last few kilometers around a high-value site, against targets that jammers and interceptor drones may miss. The jet-powered Shahed makes this layer more important, not less.

The third is that legacy platforms are a strategic reserve if industry is organized to exploit them. Old hulls in storage are not museum pieces; they are the chassis for the next mission set. The Gepard proved this once. The Skyranger 35 on Leopard 1 is proving it again.

The fourth is that combat feedback is a strategic asset. Ukraine’s crews are now learning how these systems perform against real Russian drones and missiles. Their experience will shape European doctrine and procurement for Skyranger 30 and 35 fleets that are still years from full fielding. A close working relationship between Rheinmetall and the Ukrainians, built through the Rheinmetall Ukrainian Defense Industry joint venture established in October 2023 and its repair hub in western Ukraine since June 2024, is the channel through which those lessons can travel.

Conclusion

The Leopard 1 Skyranger 35 is not a wonder weapon. It is something more useful: a demonstration that Europe can take a Cold War hull, mate it with a modern sensor-and-gun turret, finance it creatively and deliver it to a country at war, in less time than it takes most new programs to clear their first design review.

For Ukraine, it is another layer of protection for cities, power stations and supply routes under constant attack. For Rheinmetall, it is a battlefield showcase for a product line that Germany and other European states are buying in growing numbers. And for Western defense planners, it is a reminder that the drone age is being shaped not only by new platforms, but by how quickly existing capabilities can be adapted, networked and put into the hands of those doing the fighting.

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