![]() “One of the things you can obviously use this for if you’re trying to avoid a tank versus tank engagement is to dig them in, in defensive positions, sit the tank in the pit so you can only see the turret and then that can be used to defend a front line against the counterattack,” he said. If that is to be their purpose, Delaney believes the T-55 may still prove useful. “So, not necessarily tanks going forward, but more kind of firing into a long distance.” “Some of those systems are probably going to be used in a rear area initially,” he said. He has since visited the frontlines in Eastern Ukraine and, as Russia goes on the defensive, tank-on-tank battles have so far been rare and he believes the T-55s’ usage will be limited in scope. Lee has been following the Russian invasion of Ukraine from the start, using open-source technology to gather information on the fighting in Ukraine. And when you’re doing that, then you’re really obviously in quite a bit of difficulty.” ![]() “We’re hearing about them taking chips out of washing machines. “We’ve got multiple pieces of evidence that Russian industry, which had been given access to Western technology in the 90s, is really suffering from the restrictions,” Taylor said. Trevor Taylor, director of the Defence, Industries and Society Programme at the Royal United Services Institute, says Western sanctions are also slowing down Russia’s weapons production. “They are producing some new tanks - they are still producing T-90s - but, at the scale (required), they need more equipment than they can produce so they’re relying on older and older tanks to compensate,” Lee added. “Overall Russia has lost a lot of equipment, it’s hard to build new equipment,” said Robert Lee, a former US Marine and senior fellow at the US-based Foreign Policy Research Institute. Beyond quantity, a big issue is the speed at which Russian armor is being taken down. The Netherlands-based open-source intelligence website Oryx says it has visual evidence Russia has lost more than 1,900 tanks since the beginning of the invasion, nearly two-thirds of an initial fleet of around 3,000. But, in recent weeks, well-connected pro-Kremlin bloggers have shared photographs showing these tanks, reportedly in Russian-occupied territories in Ukraine. Russia hasn’t confirmed it is deploying the T-55 to the front line and the Ministry of Defense in Moscow did not respond to CNN’s request for comment. US to begin training Ukrainian forces on Abrams tanks next month U.S Soldiers assigned to Alpha Company 3rd Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment, 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division (3-1 ABCT) operationally controlled by the 1st Infantry Division (1 ID), operate a M1A1 Abrams to engage a simulated opposing force while conducting amphibious assault training during the Bull Run training exercise at Bemowo Piskie, Poland, Nov. Cheap, reliable, easy to use and easy to maintain, it was a military mainstay from Egypt to China to Sudan, where they are still in use. “From the mid-50s onwards, there was this concept that tried to come up with a tank that could do a bit of everything and that became known as the main battle tank.”įor the Red Army, that was the T-55 and its many variants, which later became the most widely produced tank in the world, with more than 100,000 units built. “Up until that point, you’d had three very distinctive types of tanks, light, medium and heavy, which had different roles on the battlefield,” Delaney said. ![]() “This was the first main battle tank used by the Soviet Union in the Cold War era,” said historian John Delaney, a senior curator at the Imperial War Museum (IWM) in Duxford, Cambridge, as he shows one to CNN. They’re so old, you can find them in museums. The tanks are T-55s, a model first commissioned by the Soviet Union’s Red Army in 1948, shortly after the end of World War II. Moscow has been known to bring out older military equipment from storage to help it prosecute the war in Ukraine, but these are different. The video, seemingly filmed in late March, shows old Soviet tanks being transported, somewhere in Russia. ![]() “This is the second train, there was one like it just before.” “Wow,” a woman says, pointing her camera phone at the convoy. A cargo train loaded with tanks chugs along under the crisp, spring sun.
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