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Russian improvised armor destroying tanks it’s meant to protect
Russian crews complain that hefty, improvised armor shells break the transmission on their tanks after just a few kilometers.
According to interview excerpts posted by Russian tank historian Andrei Tarasenko, mounting this “tsar mangal” style turtle armor on the tank’s chassis quickly overloads the gearboxes.
One Russian tank “didn't even make it 10 kilometers before one of the side gearboxes failed,” an interviewee told Russian outlet Vault8. This tank was equipped with a makeshift shell made out of cables.
If the armor shell is instead mounted on the turret, the weight burns out the driver, making the turret impossible to rotate, especially by hand.
Ukrainian tank operators from the 13th Khartia Brigade confirmed the Russians’ woes to Euromaidan Press.
Passing along his colleagues’ words, Khartia spokesman Volodymyr Dehtiaryov said that improvised armor that weighs several tons does take Russian tanks out of order quickly.
However, he added that the Russians don’t seem to mind losing tanks in this way, as long as they are able to get close enough to inflict enough damage to Ukrainian positions.
According to Tarasenko’s post, the Russians are also complaining about shortages of reactive armor, especially the modern Relikt system. Russian crews are trying to make up for the shortage with improvised solutions.
“On the turret cheeks, there’s a homemade version from garage workshops — sheet metal shaped like factory plating with an explosive insert from the UR-77 mine-clearing line charge. It works about 50/50 at a 45 degree angle,” the Russian crewman is quoted as saying.
Tanks struggle to evolve in the age of drone warfare
Tanks often lead Russian mechanized assaults, absorbing drone attacks with their bolted-on armor, clearing mines with their front-mounted rollers, and firing their cannons to suppress Ukrainian troops.
This add-on armor comes in a variety of shapes, sizes and weight profiles, evolving over the course of the full-scale invasion from simple cages, to solid steel sheds, to an arrangement of bristling cables, resembling the quills of a porcupine.
There is evidence to suggest that improvised armor is effective at letting the tanks survive more hits from certain types of drones, like FPVs. Some Russian assaults hinge on whether the defenders can run out of drones before the Russians run out of vehicles to overwhelm their positions.
However, the Russians cannot keep sacrificing tanks forever. The Kremlin may be desperate enough for usable armor to pull old T-64s out of storage and try to make them work. Alternatively, the Russians could continue to rely on infantry offensives in the short term, to buy more time for their mechanized forces to recover.
