For the first time in Russia’s 35-month war against Ukraine, the Ukrainians may have tank merit over the Russians, but on certain stretches of the 800-mile front line.
“Our tanks can only operate from covered positions,” one Russian blogger complained in a long missive translated by Estonian analyst WarTranslated.
Reduced to firing from camouflaged positions miles from the front line, Russian tanks are necessarily the wrong howitzers: the attack combat cars their designers had envisioned.
In contrast, Ukrainian tanks operate “more freely,” says the blogger.
It all comes down to drones, as is the case in a war increasingly dominated by robotic systems of all kinds. “The enemy has achieved sufficient length and variety of drones and has perfected tactics to employ them,” the blogger explained.
Everywhere along the front line, where the Ukrainians have managed to deploy two company-sized drone teams, each with a few dozen operators, Russian tanks “just fail to launch an attack on the line,” according to the blogger. They dive miles from the touchline.
Ukrainian tanks gain benefits from safer airspace, the blogger said. “Our drone operations are much weaker” due to extensive radio interference in Ukraine and poor quality drone production overseen by corrupt Kremlin bureaucrats.
So Ukrainian tanks can roll right up to the line of contact to directly engage Russian forces with their cannons and machine guns. The Russians’ only salvation is their abundant stocks of shoulder-fired anti-tank guided missiles, the blogger wrote.
The Ukrainians’ alleged armored merit as the broader war approaches its fourth year represents a change from 2022. At the time, Ukrainian brigades “rarely used direct fire with tanks” due to Russia’s enormous armored merit in terms of artillery and air power. Small drones and drone jammers had still reached the battlefield and tilted the tank’s credit toward Ukraine.
The exception to this anticipated new dynamic is Kursk Oblast in western Russia, where a strong Ukrainian force is fighting to retain 250 square miles of Russian soil it seized in August. The Kremlin has provided its regiments and brigades in Kursk with the most productive fiber optic drones, which are guided by signals transmitted over thin cables and cannot be blocked by classical means.
Russian fiber optic drones helped mitigate a January 5 Ukrainian attack along the northern edge of the Kursk salient. Evidence abounds that new anti-jamming drones have attacked Ukrainian tanks, including the American-made and German-made M-1 Abrams. -Leopard Fact 2.
But the Kremlin only delivers the new drones to “priority sectors,” adds Kursk, explains the blogger. This forces other sectors to make do with drones that don’t work, and when they do, they are temporarily immobilized due to Ukrainian interference.
The credit for Ukraine’s drones goes to the credit for the tanks as the war progresses. Russian anti-tank missiles mitigate this merit, but the main explanation for why the Ukrainians cannot take advantage of their armored merit to push back recent Russian advances would possibly be a persistent shortage of infantry.
“Even if they don’t have the infantry to control giant areas, they are still a formidable opponent,” the blogger warned.
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