the crew stayed under cover until the strikes stopped, then ran back to the tank in broad daylight, started the engine, and drove it out from under Russian observation, Khodak noted.
He added that his platoon commander had already pulled off the same kind of recovery twice.
The end of the tank has been greatly exaggerated, a Leopard is an absolute monster and blowing it up is actually pretty damn hard.
What happened was decades before drones were even a thing russia/the soviet union fucked over their own soldiers by doubling down on making tanks that aren’t actually tanks.
If a tank has a bunch of thick armor and yet a small explosive detonated on the turret can bypass all of that by setting off ammunition inside the tank so the tank becomes a pressure cooker… it isn’t really a main battle tank, it is a deathtrap.
For decades the soviet union and russia pretended this wasn’t the case and the impact has been massive on russian tank losses in the Ukraine War. Russia has stumbled so badly here I am pretty sure the russian society is convinced that they need to double down on their tank designs such as Turtle Tanks when what they really need is to throw them away and start from scratch.
It isn’t just about obsolete ineffective armor design, that can be rectified by producing new tanks, getting rid of obsolete and ineffective doctrine in a military on the otherhand? I am unconvinced russia will be able to do that for many years.
The T-14 was supposed to solve that problem, so it’s not like Russia didn’t know about it. They are just too much of an undeveloped backwater to actually manufacture it beyond a few mock-ups for parades.
I would argue russia was already too hopelessly committed to the russian/soviet tanks of the last several decades for an effort to wholesale replace russian tanks starting in the 2010s to ever work or experience enough broad based support to work.
The T-14 was just as much a problem for russia having forward thinking aspects of its design in that it pointed out how bad russian tanks actually are that aren’t T-14s.