TThe new discipline is called turret toss. Hundreds of videos can be found on Twitter under this keyword. They show tanks whose turret explodes in a fireball after being hit with anti-tank weapons. Sometimes the turret is thrown up forty meters, sometimes it lands dozens of meters next to the burned-out vehicle.
Most often this is the variant of T-64 or T-72 tanks used by both Russian and Ukrainian armed forces. The number stands for the year in which series production began. The T-72 was constantly modernized and built more often than any other tank. However, he has not been up to date for a long time, and in the Ukraine war former strengths are proving to be weaknesses.
Ukrainian troops were able to stem losses
The war is still characterized by artillery duels. Most recently, thanks to modern Western guns, the Ukrainians managed to slow down the advance of the Russian attackers in the east of the country. They have destroyed a number of ammunition depots and command centers. And because modern American multiple rocket launchers have superior firing distances, Ukrainian troops were also able to stem their own casualties. The Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is now talking about thirty soldiers a day, in May and June it was 100 to 200, at times even up to 500 soldiers.
With the offensive of the Ukrainians in the south of the country, in the Kherson region, the focus will increasingly shift to tanks. Artillery fire is designed to weaken the enemy, tearing gaps in their defenses – but these gaps must then be pierced with tanks and infantry. There is no other way to reclaim the terrain.
The western states have prepared Kyiv for this, but so far not with western tanks. Rather, some allies who were once part of the Warsaw Pact have been combing through their legacy holdings. So Poland offered about 240 T-72 tanks, the Czech Republic 60, Slovakia 30 and Slovenia up to 40 (in a Yugoslav variant).
Both Poland and Czechoslovakia produced this Soviet model under license during the Cold War. Most of the vehicles are now in Ukrainian hands. In mid-June, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin spoke of 237 main battle tanks that had been delivered. How great the benefit of these deliveries is, however, has yet to be proven. If you look at the facts soberly, there is no reason for great optimism.
Warring parties lost a quarter of their tanks
The casualties suffered by both sides in tanks are already horrendous. The most reliable is the information from the blog “Oryx”, all visually documented. According to this, Russia has lost 885 main battle tanks by the beginning of this week, most of them T-72 variants. Ukraine lost 226 tanks, mostly T-64s, which form the backbone of their army and were once built in Kharkiv.
