Japan Quietly Arms Ukraine with a Mud-Hugging Workhorse

A Surprise from the East. Japan’s Morooka PC-065B Hits the Ukrainian Front

Morooka PC-065B in Ukraine. Courtesy AFU

As first revealed by my friend and former boss, David Axe at Forbes, a rare Japanese donation to Ukraine has just been spotted at the front.

In a war defined by exotic FrankenSAM air defense systems, it’s easy to overlook a five-ton tracked dumper. But one just quietly rolled onto the battlefield in Ukraine, and it’s not Russian. It’s Japanese.

Meet the Morooka PC-065B: unarmed, unarmored, and probably the most tactically useful vehicle you’ve never heard of. It’s a tracked engineering platform originally designed for hauling rocks on Japanese construction sites. And now it’s hauling survival across the trench lines of Eastern Ukraine.

In a recent video, Ukrainian engineers were spotted operating the PC-065B at the front—its rubber tracks crawling across springtime mud like it was born there.

They weren’t building luxury condos. They were reinforcing bunkers, shuttling materials to sappers, and doing the gritty work that keeps Ukrainian infantry alive through artillery hell.

Here’s the twist: This is the first time Japan has provided military ground vehicles, of any kind, to a nation in active combat since World War II. Quietly, surgically, and wrapped in the polite diplomatic cloth of “non-lethal aid,” Japan just dropped one of its most versatile dual-use tools right into the heart of Europe’s deadliest war.

And it didn’t make the front page. But I got you covered.

From Tokyo with (Strategic) Love

Let’s be clear. Japan’s constitution, specifically Article 9, prohibits it from engaging in offensive war or exporting weapons. So when Tokyo says “non-lethal aid,” it means it. No Type 10 tanks, no F-2s, no missiles.