Hundreds of Russian tanks are believed to have been destroyed since Moscow launched its offensive, with Britain’s Defense Secretary Ben Wallace estimating on Monday it had lost as many as 580.
But Moscow’s problems go beyond the mere number of tanks lost. Experts say battlefield images show Russian tanks suffer from a defect that Western militaries have known about for decades, dubbed the “behind-the-barrel effect.” Moscow, they say, should have seen the problem coming.
The problem concerns the storage of tank ammunition. Unlike modern Western tanks, Russian tanks carry multiple shells in their turrets. This makes them very vulnerable, as even an indirect hit can set off a chain reaction that detonates their entire ammo supply of up to 40 grenades.
The resulting shockwave can be enough to blast the tank’s turret as high as a two-story building, as seen in a recent video shared on social media.
“What we’re seeing with Russian tanks is a design flaw,” said Sam Bendett, adviser to the Russian Studies Program at the Center for a New American Security.
“Each successful hit…quickly ignites the ammo, causing a massive explosion and the turret is literally blown away.”
The error means the tank’s crew – usually two men in the turret and a third at the wheel – are on the run, said Nicholas Drummond, a defense industry analyst specializing in land warfare and a former British Army officer.
“If you don’t get out in the first second, you’re roasted.”
The “jack-in-the-box” effect
Drummond said exploding munitions are causing problems for nearly all armored vehicles deployed by Russia in Ukraine. He gave the example of the BMD-4 infantry fighting vehicle, normally manned by up to three crew members and capable of carrying an additional five soldiers. He said the BMD-4 is a “mobile coffin”. “only obliterated” when hit by a missile.
But the design flaw with its tanks should be particularly annoying for Moscow since the problems became so widespread.
They came to the attention of Western military officials during 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 fate – gun turrets were blown off their bodies in anti-tank missile strikes.
Drummond said Russia has not learned the lessons of Iraq and many of its tanks in Ukraine have similar design flaws in their self-loading missile systems.
If the The T-90 series — the successor to the T-72 — entered service in 1992, its armor was upgraded, but its missile loading system remained similar to that of its predecessor, leaving it just as vulnerable, Drummond said. The T-80, another Russian tank used in the invasion of Ukraine, has a similar missile loading system.
Such a system has some advantages. Bendett of the Center for a New American Security said Russia chose this system to save space and give the tanks a lower profile, making them harder to hit in combat.
Western military leaders, however, had been spurred into action by the fate of the T-72 in Iraq.
“[Western military personnel]all learned from the Gulf War and from seeing tanks killed during that time that you have to compartmentalize the munitions,” Drummond said.
He referred to the US military’s Stryker infantry fighting vehicles, which were developed after the first war in Iraq.
“That has a turret that sits on top, and that turret doesn’t intrude into the crew compartment. It just sits on top and all the ammo is in that turret,” he said. “So if the tower is hit and blown away, the crew below is still safe. It’s a very clever design.”
Other western tanks, like the M1 Abrams used by the US and some allied armies, are larger and don’t have a carousel. In the Abrams, a fourth crewman in the tank retrieves shells from a sealed compartment and transfers them to the gun for firing.
The compartment has a door that the crew member opens and closes between each shot of the tank, meaning that if the tank hits, it’s likely to only expose one shell in the turret.
“A precise hit can damage the tank, but not necessarily kill the crew,” Bendett said.
And Drummond said the grenades used by western militaries sometimes burn under the high heat generated by an incoming missile, but they do not explode.
Difficult to replace
It is not easy to determine how many Russian tanks were destroyed in Ukraine. Open-source intelligence surveillance website Oryx said April 28 that at least 300 Russian tanks had been destroyed and another 279 either damaged, abandoned or captured.
However, the website only counts cases where it has visual evidence, so Russian casualties could be much higher.
And these losses aren’t just about equipment. When Wallace, the British Defense Secretary, gave the House of Commons his estimate of 580 tanks lost, he also said that more than 15,000 Russian military personnel had been killed during his invasion.
It is difficult to say how many of these are tank crews, but there is no doubt that the crews are not easy to replace.
Training a tank crew can take up to 12 months, said Aleski Roinila, a former tank crew member in the Finnish Armed Forces, “and that’s considered fast.”
And for Russia to replace hundreds of crew members at this point in the war would be a huge challenge – especially when the tanks they are expected to field are so faulty.