Russia Appears to Be Deploying 75-Year-Old Tanks to Ukraine [View all]
Russia appears to be deploying 75 year old tanks to Ukraine.
According to Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT), an open source intelligence group based in the country of Georgia, the Kremlin has started pulling T-54 and T-55 tanks from a storage base in the far east of Russia. The T-54 and T-55 tanks were built starting in the late 1940s and the Soviet Union built a lot of them. The USSR manufactured more than 100,000 of the tanks in the decade after the war, making it the most widely produced tank in the world.
CIT found photos on VK, a Russian social media site, from people near the base that showed the tanks had been pulled from storage. They also found photographs of the tanks being placed on trains for shipment. After CIT published its investigation, footage of the T-54s moving by train appeared online.
Russia’s tanks have been having a bad time in Ukraine. It already deployed Cold War era T-62s, upgraded with reactive armor and modern optics, only to lose most of them. According to Oryx, an open source intelligence group that’s tracking Russian losses in Ukraine, the Kremlin has lost almost 2,000 tanks in Ukraine.
Sending in ancient T-54 retrofitted with modern equipment would certainly bolster the numbers, but it’s hard to imagine them fairing better than T-62s. It’s also impossible to know how many of the 75 year old tanks still work and what’s required to make them run again.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxjq7q/russia-appears-to-be-deploying-75-year-old-tanks-to-ukraine
No wonder they're so easy to tow with your John Deere!
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