In a shocking video embellished with 3D images, on April 13, Volodymyr Zelensky listed the heavy equipment needed to face a major Russian offensive in Donbass. Among these, the T-72, a Soviet tank. This precision owes nothing to chance. The Ukrainian forces are familiar with this tank, which several Central European countries have. The delivery to kyiv of a first batch of a dozen T-72s by the Czech Republic, revealed at the beginning of the month, should soon be followed by others. Poland has notably announced its intention to draw from the hundred copies it has.
But will these deliveries be sufficient? Emblematic of high-intensity confrontations, the tank is proving to be a decisive element of the war in Ukraine. And across the world, military academies are sure to learn valuable lessons from its use since the start of Vladimir Putin’s invasion.
The first phase of the conflict – the Kremlin’s failed attempt to take kyiv – especially highlighted the vulnerability of Russian tanks. Social networks in particular showed many tanks, the turret of which popped like a champagne cork. “Russian tankers are sitting on a volcano with their ammunition placed under the turret, while in American tanks or French Leclercs, the shells are in a sealed compartment, which can come off”, explains Yann Boivin, former lieutenant- colonel in the French army and host of the blog Blablachar.
Many ambushes
On the 2,800 combat-capable tanks available to it, the Russian army would have lost more than 500 by mid-April, according to the independent site Oryx. Based on images available on the Internet, its analysts estimated that half had been destroyed (the rest having been captured or abandoned).
Ukrainian soldiers take delivery of a load of Javelin anti-tank missiles in kyiv on February 11, 2022.
afp.com/Sergei SUPINSKY
This carnage is primarily the result of numerous ambushes carried out by the Ukrainian army, thanks to their knowledge of the terrain and the mass delivery of anti-tank weapons, such as American Javelins or British NLAWs – 30,000 according to certain sources. These sophisticated rocket-launching missiles reach their target with a bell-shaped end of trajectory, which explains the homemade protection cages of some Russian tanks.
“Not the level of training required”
Another explanation for these spectacular losses: the poor use of these tanks by the Russian army, often deployed without the support of infantry and artillery, to the greater benefit of their adversaries. “The videos revealed that the units involved probably did not have the level of training required for such operations, with aberrant tactics, such as static tanks, often without the necessary support”, underlines Yann Boivin.
The pro-Ukrainian camp now expects Moscow, learning the lessons of this failed first phase, to make more rational use of its tanks. The Pentagon has revealed that the Russians have been building up troops, artillery and armor for a few weeks to carry out a massive offensive in the East.
Its spokesman, John Kirby, confirmed that the battle of Donbass will be different from that of kyiv, this time on “a little flatter, a little more open” ground. It will be more difficult for the Ukrainians to set up ambushes against much less dispersed forces. Hence the need for Volodymyr Zelensky to acquire as quickly as possible this heavy equipment likely to be quickly operable by his troops. Like the Czech and Polish T-72s.