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.
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.