(Donbas) The one thing that has come out in the wash these past 2 years, is how poor Russian tanks are when it comes to protection. The main issue is primarily with all the tanks from the T64 onwards (T72/T80/T90) seeing as they are all based around the T64 which was designed to be smaller than contemporary designs (AMX 30/ Leopard 1/ Chieftain/ M60) but just as lethal. However getting rid of a crew member and replacing him with an autoloader which whilst a good idea when designed when the enemy was supposed to attack from the front, (which is why the Soviet era tanks are pretty well protected from that direction) hasn't aged very well with the advent of Anti-tank guided Missiles and of late First Person View (FPV) drones which can attack from all directions.
The Russians noted this weakness somewhat earlier on and after adding additional armour to the front of the T72 tank either side of the main gun (which garnered the nickname '
Dolly Patton and Super Dolly Patton", they went down the path of
Explosive Reactive Armour (the tiny little bricks) common on Russian armour) which culminated in the
T72B3M which came into service in 2014 where the ERA bricks are thinner , less distinguishable and flow into each other than previous iterations as seen below where the ERA on the front of the T72B3M cannot really be seen.
Most of the world looked at the latest Russian tanks as world beating and excused their poor showing across the Middle East as due to poor training and lesser quality export models sold by Russia and then the Ukraine happened and all the weaknesses of the T64 onwards which had supposed to have been rectified turned out not to have. Which explains the following video of a T80BV tank from last week, which on getting hit by a FPV drone (usually a drone with an RPG warhead affixed)
suffers a catastrophic explosion which as we have seen this past 2 years has become something of a hallmark of Russian armour. The only problem for the Ukraine, is that Russia has thousands of tanks in stock and a leader willing to accept horrendous losses.
