Russia's battlefield improvisations reveal dire vehicle shortages
The Russians are deploying increasingly bizarre equipment in combat. Russia appears particularly affected by the shortage of infantry fighting vehicles and armoured personnel carriers. Not only are civilian vehicles repurposed for assaults, but there are also strange creations based on partially functioning tanks. Here's how they manage and how they're made.
The video below shows a Russian armoured personnel carrier, fashioned from the hull of a T-80BW tank, stuck in a Ukrainian anti-tank trench. This situation forced the crew and the accompanying infantry to evacuate, as an immobilised 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 three wrecks are needed to produce one functional unit. However, this is sometimes insufficient, leading to various hybrids, like the T-90M tank with a T-72B3 turret.
At times, even that falls short, as the hulls lack turrets. The Russians attempt to convert them 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.
Although the concept is similar, the unit in question looks more like a factory production than a field improvisation assembled from scrap, known as "armoured barns." The aim is to use the well-armoured chassis as a foundation for building an armoured superstructure that will protect the transported assault group against artillery fragments and, to a lesser extent, drones.
The downside of such a solution is a significant deterioration in situational awareness. 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. This means that any sufficiently deep trench can become a dead-end trap if there's no second tank or technical support vehicle with a winch nearby.
