Russia's improvised armour: Innovative or desperate measures?
The Russians are deploying increasingly bizarre equipment in combat. Russia seems to be particularly affected by the lack of infantry fighting vehicles and armoured personnel carriers. Not only are civilian vehicles used in assaults, but also odd creations based on partially functioning tanks. Here's how they manage and how they're created.
The video below shows a Russian armoured personnel carrier based on the hull of a T-80BW tank stuck in a Ukrainian anti-tank ditch. This forced the evacuation of the crew and the accompanying infantry, as an immobilized vehicle like this is an ideal target for drones or artillery.
Russia's armoured Frankensteins — here's how and why they create them
The Russians have already used up most of the armoured shells kept in their strategic junkyards, where sometimes it takes three wrecks to produce one functional unit. However, this is sometimes not enough, leading to various types of hybrids like the T-90M tank with a T-72B3 turret.
Sometimes even that isn't enough, as there are no turrets for hulls, which the Russians attempt to convert into heavy armoured personnel carriers by adding an armoured superstructure covered with Kontakt-1 reactive armour blocks and an anti-drone net on the roof.
The discussed unit looks like a factory production rather than a field improvisation assembled from scrap, known as "armoured barns", even though the concept is similar. The goal is to use the well-armoured chassis as a base for building an armoured superstructure protecting artillery fragments and, to a lesser extent, drones for the transported assault group.
The downside of such a solution is a significant deterioration in situational awareness, as only the driver has a good forward view, with no assistance from the commander, who usually has a better view through viewports or periscopes mounted at the top of the turret. Any sufficiently deep ditches can become a dead-end trap if there's no second tank or technical support vehicle with a winch nearby.
