Americans ‘surprised’ by what they saw inside the T-90A tank

That reliability when poorly maintained is essentially sloppy, loose designs. If you ever watch an AK fire in slow mo, you can watch every part wobbling all over.

Was that by design, or did they lack capabilities of mass production of high precision pieces?

The key thing is the grime, dirt, and rust everywhere in the crew compartment. That's where the tank crew is basically living for weeks on end, and if they can't even keep that clean what is the maintenance quality of the engine like?

I am also ignorant but judging by the picture of an M1 Abrams Interior on Wikipedia https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/M1_Abram...

It looks like the principal difference is the amount of rust on the T-90 and the fact that the thing looks like it hasn't had much attention paid to it.

I imagine this is one of those things that is a question of scale. If you're using the machine, you're only 10% likely to encounter a failure. But at a fleet of 1000, you actually have 100 tanks out of full operation. And in crucial moments, it may be that you're forced to jam the gear shift forward multiple times, or compensate for a misaligned sight or something that leads to overall reduced operational efficiency.

And one can imagine that if these parts are rusted, other critical parts have also encountered poor maintenance.

So overall, the short message is that this tank is in bad condition. The longer message is that this tank is typical of Russian tanks and Russian force preparedness and is therefore an indicator that the invasion they're prosecuting will encounter difficulties.

There's my speculation, and I hope it's concrete enough that someone will correct me about the parts I'm obviously wrong about. Sadly, neither the article nor the linked tweets were obvious about what is shown in detail.

There's a linked tweet to a picture of the inside of the tank, which looks like it's in pretty bad repair. There's rust, dirt on equipment - just evidence in general that basic maintenance is not being done. And, fwiw, the T90A entered service in 2004, so it's maybe a 19 year old tank.

In other news: country with 800bn spending for military, has good tanks.

Their approach has historically been to just throw whatever people and equipment they have at the front and overwhelm with numbers. I suspect they initially sought a different approach and fell back on ol' reliable.

Check out a site like Ground News if you want to look at a story across the board on perspectives. It gives pretty great insight into how stories are framed differently among competing publications.

> they undeniably continue to fight and serve Putin's wishes

Sure. Against an opponent they were widely expected to knock out in a matter of days/weeks. A year later.

Stubbornness and a willingness to send soldiers to their deaths for no good reason should not be mistaken for competence.

We know that they're bringing ancient equipment out of storage, and have lost more than 10,000 vehicles, and that's only the verified losses.

https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-docum...

Now the small amount of modern equipment they have are being shown to be in bad condition too.

If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then there's really a chance that it might be a duck.

Russia has proven to be weak on the battlefield so have been forced to pivot to a war of attrition, hoping to win by sending more men into the meat grinder and using systematic war crimes, presumably in an effort to weaken the defenders' resolve.

Part of it is consuming extremes from both sides and figuring out the Venn diagram of the truth based on what both parties are acknowledging. You can also look at a variety of commenters who are reasonably middle-ground in their analysis. On YT, for me, I consume Perun (pro-Ukraine but largely factual analysis), WillyOAM, Military History Visualized, and History Legends (comes across kinda pro-Russia). I also like the ( https://old.reddit.com/r/UkraineRussiaReport/ ) subreddit, which has Russian-leaning mods, oddly making it perhaps the least-biased subreddit on the war (everywhere else is a DEEP pro-Ukraine echo chamber, including r/combatfootage). For general reasonably-non-biased news, avoid r/worldnews and visit...... r/anime_titties (note the underscore). Seriously, that's a news aggregator subreddit.

The Russian army was several times the size of the Ukrainian in troops and armored vehicles. Their air force was even larger, relatively speaking. They've been a major arms exporter for half a century, with all kinds of supposedly cutting-edge equipment (like these tanks). They were one of the largest and deadliest militaries in the world, on paper. This was supposed to be an absolute cake walk for them, and the result was considered a foregone conclusion.

More than a year later, they're struggling to hold on to a few border regions against Ukrainian counterattack--and to accomplish that required large-scale conscription and rolling out obsolete mothballed equipment.

So I wouldn't dismiss reports like these as propaganda so easily, myself...