Onion articles are writing itself: Western Military Observers shocked that Russians are not commiting war crimes like they did in Iraq and Afghanistan. - When we were in Middle East, we started to wreck shit up, shelling with depleted uranium, bombing villages. I’m suprised that Russian are such weak bitches - retired col. said. - My men have PTSD and are homeless but at least we protected special interests of Oil Companies and the ruling class.
There is a mix of old and new equipment. From what we see most of their tanks seem to be T-72B3s alongside older models such as the T-72A and T-72AV (which seem to be used for rear echelon troops). I’ve seen pictures of a single T-90 and a video of a T-80BVM (apparently, hard to confirm) which suffered an internal detonation which separated the turret from the hull.
Their IFVs and APCs are also mixed equipment, MT-LBs from the 60s as well as BMP-1s, a couple of BMP-2 which is still reliable in today’s battlefield but very few modern armored transports so far.
They’ve also held their strategic bomber fleet back, so no Tu-160s. As for their rocket and missile artillery, they’re using Kalibr and Iskanders… which are pretty new.
And this is the so-called military disappointment, a regular army that is advancing on another regular army with mostly late soviet era tech… and in two or three days it managed to reach the capital and make a series of breakthroughs in the south and east without fully deploying it’s firepower and being quite soft with it’s artillery.
I don’t know if there is much of a practical difference between their T72s and newer tanks under the conditions they are fighting in right now. They aren’t facing peer armor very much.
It was old Soviet doctrine to use the older T55s and such ahead of the newer T62s, T64s , and T72s for similar reasons. So this is to be expected.
