In another battlefield incident not helpful for Kremlin claims of military-technical dominance and top-quality combat kit, recent video published by Ukraine’s national spy agency showed a high-tech US-made Switchblade-600 kamikaze drone – for the first time ever – striking and utterly demolishing a T-90M main battle tank, the pride of Russian armor forces.
The images published on Nov. 25 on official information platforms operated by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), the country’s national intelligence and law enforcement agency, showed high resolution video of a drone strike against a Russian T-90M driving at speed on a dirt road. Subsequent impact images recorded by another drone show the tank engulfed by a massive explosion.
Image quality and graphics in the video closely matched recordings of Switchblade drone strikes published by the SBU in the past, but Kyiv Post could not confirm the new content independently. Major Ukrainian media reported the Switchblade 600 strike made public by the SBU marked the first time the US’s most-advanced kamikaze drone destroyed Russia’s best tank.
An advanced attack system whose deployment to Ukraine has been dogged by technical glitches and manufacturing delays, Switchblade drones have almost always been flown in past combat by commandos from Alpha Group, an SBU special operations unit.
The SBU claim and news reports of the Switchblade’s taking out a T-90 for the first time ever, was preceded by overflight images published on Nov. 23 of two Russian T-90 tanks abandoned by their crews and then set afire by conventional Ukrainian drones dropping thermite grenades in combat near the village Novooleksandrivka in the eastern Pokrovsk sector.
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Boasting advanced ceramic/metal layered armor, anti-missile jammers, a powerful 125mm cannon, and see-in-the-dark thermal sights, the T-90 has long been touted in Russian state media as the best tank in the world, as well as a perfect example of robust Russian weapon engineering superior to relatively brittle and overcomplicated NATO nation designs. The tank’s official nickname – Proryv (Прорыв) meaning “breakthrough” – has been the topic of smack talk by no less than Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“The T-90 Proryv is the best tank in the world. One hundred percent! Right now, we can say that the T-90 Proryv is the best tank in the world. As soon as it gets into position, forget it! There’s nothing anyone can against it!” the Russian leader enthused in December 2023 comments aired on state television nationally.
But repeatedly, across the fighting front, battlefield realities have put paid to claims like that.
In one of the worst tactical defeats seen by Kremlin armor in that past six months, a column of nearly 20 tanks and armored personnel carriers, led by a spear tip of T-90s, tried to break into Ukrainian positions near the town Siversk, in the northeastern Luhansk sector. The Nov. 3 attack was across open ground with little cover.
Video recorded by Ukrainian observation drones and later published by Ukraine’s joint forces Siversk command and one of the defending units, 10th Mountain Brigade, showed the Russian column driving into a dense crossfire of artillery, anti-tank missiles and drone-dropped land mines.
One T-90 is shown to take multiple kamikaze drone hits before grinding to a stop, probably because of track damage. Drones later swoop in to drop thermite grenades, or simply blow up and set fires after smacking into halted vehicles. Other FPV kamikaze drones hunt down individual Russian soldiers.
Ukrainian forces claimed 10 Russian tanks, among them T-90s, destroyed with practically no Ukrainian losses in the three-hour battle.
The preferred Ukrainian tactic of launching kamikaze drone after drone until the tank catches on fire was captured in detail by the Ukrainian strike drone unit Hostri Kartuzy (Гострі Картузи, or Peaky Blinders) in a series of attacks against an abandoned T-90 in the eastern Kurakhove sector. In video published by that unit on Nov. 11, the pilot attacks the tank’s front-driver hatch, which is cracked open, and with no small finesse flies his kamikaze drone into the T-90’s driver’s compartment. Detonation of the $500 drone inside the tank sets a T-90 costing about $5 million on fire.
On Nov. 19 Ukraine’s 54th Mechanized Brigade published video of a T-90S tank, an export variant normally delivered to the Indian military, captured in working order and driven back to friendly lines for further service with the Ukrainian army. The capture, according to Ukrainian news reports, took place in October. In the November video, a Ukrainian driver points out that the Russian crew that abandoned the tank had installed a computer tablet to navigate in battle along a pre-set GPS track, and appeared to have driven straight until Ukrainian weaponry stopped forward movement.
Additional embarrassing content for Russia surfaced on Nov. 8, when Russian soldiers, encountering the remains of two tanks in a wheatfield, uploaded several videos of themselves standing next to the hulks. They messaged selfies of themselves standing in front of what they assumed were demolished German Leopard 2 tanks. One soldier chortle at the primitive anti-missile armor, a plastic box with concrete inside, mounted on the tank. Internet users pointed out that the hulks were actually a pair of T-90s.
In a Tuesday article entitled “T-90M Tank – Fundamentally Flawed Pinnacle of Russian Armored Thought,” analyst Przemysław Juraszek said that the Russian army has lost a confirmed 117 T-90M tanks and that the real number is probably higher. Ukrainian drone pilots and artillerymen have learned that the tank, though powerful, has weak points: thin armor on the turret roof that even a small anti-armor munition will break through, and an exposed ammo bin on the back of the turret which, if hit correctly, ignites shells stored inside and sparks a massive detonation destroying the entire tank and crew.
The SBU’s Switchblade was armed not only with a powerful cumulative warhead dramatically overmatching the T-90’s defenses, but probably it locked onto its target using artificial intelligence, which probably made the US weapon resistant to jamming systems aboard the Russian tank, Juraszek wrote.
In a Tuesday article entitled “Russia’s T-90M Tank: Hype or Battlefield Heavyweight?” National Interest military analyst Peter Sichiu said: “The T-90M also features a common flaw found in late-era Soviet and early Russian Federation MBTs – namely that the tank is equipped with an autoloader that can hold more than 22 projectiles and charges, with an additional 21 rounds in the hull. This does allow for the tank to maintain a high rate of fire of up to seven or eight rounds per minute, but if an anti-tank rocket strikes the turret, it can set off the rounds inside. This can result in the so-called jack-in-the-box effect where the turret is blown off the hull.”
US military analyst Kris Osborn in a Nov. 2 report “Why Are Upgraded T-90 Russian Tanks Getting Decimated in the Ukraine War?” wrote: “One of the specific things that’s had a big impact in Ukraine is top-down attacks. If you have building or a ridge or something from an elevated position in the terrain, Russian tanks are much weaker on the top. And they don’t have hemispheric [all around] active protection systems that do the top as well… What happens is they’ve [Russian T-90s] been destroyed from the top. And that’s been a very significant tactical advantage that the Ukrainians have used.”
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