It’s one of the army’s weak points Russian. Since the invasion began To fly lost an enormous amount of armored vehicles and military equipment, thus revealing an unexpected weakness in conducting a War modern againstUkraine. The causes, analysts explain, lie in the unstoppable Ukrainian resistance, but also in the influx of sophisticated defense weapons through Ukraine Born. As well as unexpected help for the President’s men Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
What are Russia’s weapons? All Putin’s arsenal
Jack in the box effect
Experts say the battlefield images show Russian tanks are suffering from a defect that Western military have known about for decades and which they call the “jack-in-the-box effect.” Moscow, they say, should have recognized and solved the problem long ago, but it hasn’t, and that’s costing Russian troops a lot of money.
MEANS DESTROYED
Ukraine becomes a “tank graveyard”. The videos, filming the roads around Kyiv, Kharkiv and Mariupol, show long columns of wrecked or abandoned Russian vehicles, covered in snow and still carrying the bodies of dead soldiers. It is estimated that the Ukrainians have destroyed between 580 and 750 tanks since the beginning of the war, of course there are no official figures, but these are orders of magnitude. How could Zelensy’s forces incapacitate so many? The main armament consists of the Javelin anti-tank missiles and the Nlaw missile system, of which the London government is a major supplier. “We will continue to provide our support to ensure that Ukraine is never attacked again,” Prime Minister Boris Johnson said, hinting that the military alliance would continue after the ceasefire. In addition, the Russian military faces thorny logistical issues that it likely underestimated. “We saw pictures of Russian tanks being towed by Ukrainian farmers’ tractors. Many tanks were abandoned because they ran out of fuel. Still others got stuck in the mud because the high command marched in at the wrong time of year. These were real logistical failures,” says Philips O’Brien, a professor at St Paul’s University.
AMMUNITION
But Moscow’s technical difficulties go further and also affect the way tank ammunition is stored. Unlike modern Western vehicles, the Russian ones carry more bullets in their turrets. This makes them very vulnerable, as even an indirect hit can set off a chain reaction that detonates their entire ammo block. The resulting shock wave can be enough to disintegrate the tank turret and project it to the second jaw of a building, episodes from some videos on social networks. “We have a design flaw,” explains Sam Bendett, advisor to the Russian studies program at the Center for a New American Security, in a CNN article. “Each hit that hits the target acts as a trigger for the ammo, causing a massive explosion. The tower is literally blown up ». For the tank crew, usually two men in the turret and a third at the helm, there is no escape: “If you don’t get out in a second you’re dead,” adds Nicholas Drummond, a defense analyst specializing in land warfare and a former British Army officer .
PREVIOUS
According to Drummond, the ammunition explosion is causing problems for almost all armored vehicles that Russia is using in Ukraine. Still, he tells CNN, this criticality has been evident for decades: Western forces have been aware of it from the Gulf Wars against Iraq in 1991 and 2003, when large numbers of the Iraqi Army’s Russian-made T-72 tanks suffered the same thing Fate where the towers were blown up. In short, for experts, Russia did not learn its lesson from Iraq, and as a result, many of its tanks in Ukraine have similar design flaws with self-loading missile systems. When the T-90 series – the successor to the T-72 – entered service in 1992, its armor was upgraded, but the missile loading system remained similar to that of its predecessor, leaving it just as vulnerable, Drummond points out. The T-80, another Russian tank used in the invasion of Ukraine, has a nearly identical missile loading system. However, this system has some advantages. Bendett notes that Russia chose it to save space and give the tanks a lower profile, making them harder to hit in combat. However, strength is thwarted by experience. “Western armies learned from the Gulf War how to recognize vehicles and made it a priority to separate ammunition,” says Drummond. Like the Stryker infantry fighting vehicle, which the US military developed after the first Iraq war. “It has a tower at the top that is separate from the crew room. All ammunition is contained inside the turret, and if it is hit and detonated, the crew will be safe underneath. Other western tanks, like the M1 Abrams used by the United States and some allied armies, are larger: a fourth crewman inside the tank retrieves the bullets from a sealed compartment and transfers them to fire. The compartment has a door that opens and closes between shots from the tank. If hit, a single shot would detonate the turret. “If accurate, it can damage the tank but not necessarily kill the crew,” Bendett concludes.
© REPRODUCTION RESERVED