Praise for the soldiers and image enhancement for German technology: Video praises Ukraine’s tank crew, who pulls a T-72 out of fire with their Leopard.
Kiev – “Unfortunately, it has to be noted that only a very small number of the battle tanks delivered can still be used by Ukraine,” said Sebastian Schäfer. The news magazine noted earlier this year Mirror the Green politician’s complaint about insufficient repair capacities for the Leopard tanks from NATO stocks that were sent to the Ukraine war. Complaints and malice have accompanied the armaments from the first missions until today: it is cumbersome, vulnerable, ineffective – now the tank seems to have proven its value; as an “iron angel”.
The magazine promises “unique film material”. Defense Express regarding a drone recording on Telegram that shows a Leopard 2 tank, under fire and already with a major hit on the turret, maneuvering a Ukrainian T-72 tank out of a firefight. This means that Western armaments technology seems to have regained a bit of its reputation. But in war, “combined arms” alone increased the capabilities of the armed forces; This means that all different weapons must be synchronized tactically and operationally in order to win the battle, writes Gustav C. Gressel.
Ukraine war makes it clear: Russia cannot afford to “use up” tanks either
“In the history of warfare, a single weapon system has never been able to play a decisive, game-changing role,” said the military analyst at the European Resilience Initiative Center (ERIC) think tank. The quality of the material and the teams is reflected in the combination of their individual specializations. According to Gressel, that alone would dramatically improve Ukraine’s chances of turning the tide of war.
“The technical performance of a tank only contributes half to its combat value; the quality of the crew accounts for the other half. And here Ukraine is way ahead.”
According to Ralf Raths, it has become clear in Ukraine that the quality of the craftsmanship of the Russian tank command is “abysmal,” as he says. This makes the technical disadvantages of the material clearer: “The Russian tank is much more rustic and cruder than the Western one. In Ukraine, however, it is now very clear that the Russian doctrine of being able to ‘use up’ the tanks because you have more of them is no longer tenable. The military plans for losses,” explains the historian and director of the German Tank Museum on his YouTube channel. However, the losses would have to be kept within limits. For Ukraine even more than for Russia.
Towing a tank is unknown to the Russians, as he repeatedly emphasizes – that would contradict the Russian doctrine of unlimited supplies of people and material. The crews would disembark from a damaged or destroyed tank and simply transfer to the next one, says Raths. Russian tank crews assumed that the vehicles left behind would be collected again as the front advanced. However, the war in Ukraine is also unique: the front line in Ukraine is a death zone several kilometers deep, explains analyst Gressel.
West tank rarely seen: Leopard and Abrams would be attractive targets in the kill zone
Armored vehicles could only enter this death zone for a short time. They would have to complete their mission within 15 to 20 minutes and then quickly retreat. Otherwise, these vehicles would become the target of massive swarms of drones or artillery fire. The crews of the Western tanks had to learn this first, and that is why these weapons are now rare on the battlefield. Gressel assumes that a US M1 Abrams would have to be flanked by at least one, if not two, other tanks and would therefore offer too attractive a target for Russian artillery.
The tank on the Ukrainian battlefield has to find its way into a new role, the antiquated war machine is rattling through a transformation phase – as proven, for example, by the Russian “turtle tank”. The tanks are protected with disproportionately large and crudely welded cages; This means that their mobility is limited, but they offer enough defensive fire to enable lighter armored support vehicles to carry out an offensive. The Leopard 2, with its armor optimized against tank fire, also proved to be inadequately prepared for drones as future opponents.
Zelenskyj honors his soldiers: “Our tank drivers are true heroes!”
“On the battlefield in Ukraine there is a constant battle between innovation and counter-innovation,” writes Gressel. According to him, victory would go to the side that knows how to synchronize new technologies with conventional mechanized warfare in order to be able to act innovatively and flexibly on the battlefield – the Leopard seems a bit antiquated, but Ukraine has apparently made a virtue of necessity. “Our tank drivers are real heroes!” Ukrainian soldiers are said to have reported Defense News writes about the current rescue operation.
Opposite the engineering journal vdi news German tank expert Rolf Hilmes explained the importance of people and technology in a system as complex as a tank: “The technical performance of a tank only contributes half to its combat value, the quality of the crew accounts for the other half. And here Ukraine is way ahead.”
Scarce resource: Ukraine never had enough vehicles to recover the main battle tanks
Ukraine had received 22 Armored Recovery Vehicles (ARVs) on Leopard 1 chassis and two Buffalo recovery vehicles on Leopard 2 chassis from Germany, but had long since become innovative itself in order to pull its tank fleet from the battlefield. Like the magazine Forbes reported that after the first year of the war, Ukraine had already started converting captured Russian T-62 tanks into recovery vehicles in workshops in Ukraine. She wrote that she achieved this by dismantling the battle tank’s turret, which weighs around eight tons, and replacing it with a high-performance winch Forbes.
However, it remains questionable whether they would have been able to recover a tank of the same weight in no time, even under enemy fire. Here too, the Ukrainian army had to improvise from the start: loudly ForbesAccording to author David Ax, Ukraine would have originally only had one recovery tank for every 25 battle tanks to defend itself against its losses. According to him, the Ukrainian army never had enough ARVs to recover its own tanks – regardless of the additional need to recover the approximately 2,800 Russian vehicles that the Ukrainians had already captured at the beginning of the second year of the war.
Humiliation for Putin: Tractor drivers became the image of the country’s resistance
In analyst Gressel’s words, Ukraine’s ability to persevere comes from its methodical work on technical innovations and tactical adaptation. Moreover, only the Ukrainians who are waging this war can judge what direction these steps of innovation and adaptation will lead. According to him, Ukrainians must constantly innovate to win an arms race with the Russians. One of the first heroes of the war is Viktor Kychuk, who became famous when the war was less than a month old, according to the news agency Agence France Press had reported.
The farmer gave the first noticeable sign of Ukrainian indomitability on March 1 in Slatyne, a settlement of 6,000 residents in the north of the Kharkiv district. Not only did he pick up a broken down T-80 main battle tank on the hook of his tractor: “Kychuk sent a clip of himself and his friends escaping in the tank to the regional military chief Volodymyr Usov, who uploaded it to YouTube, where he went viral,” as the magazine said Voice of America (VOA) reported.
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, social media has regularly shown footage of Russian tanks and other military vehicles hanging on the hooks of Ukrainian agricultural machinery VOA wrote: “They quickly became a defining image of the country’s resistance.”
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