In 2022, many analysts assumed that tanks would remain the undisputed symbol of land power, but four years later the battlefield has evolved to the point where multi-ton vehicles can be neutralized for systems that fit in a backpack and cost thousands of times less.
A return at the worst time. Winter is giving way to spring in Ukraine, and Russia has decided it was time to bring out its armored vehicles again after almost one year of limited useconvinced that she could regain initiative on the front.
However, this movement has collided head-on with the current reality of the battlefield: an environment saturated with drones, remote mines and sensors where any concentration of vehicles becomes an almost immediate target. What on paper should have been an offensive reactivation has translated, in its first stages, in massive losses of material, with mechanized attacks that have ended in authentic “massacres” in a matter of minutes.
From hiding to exposing yourself. For much of the last year, Russia had chosen to reduce the use of vehicles and advance with small groups of infantry to minimize their exposure. That tactic, although costly in lives, was more difficult to neutralize in a battlefield dominated by drones.
But the enormous human wear and tear (with hundreds of thousands of casualties) has forced Moscow to rethink its approach. The return to mechanized attacks is not so much a choice as a necessity: replacing men with machines, even if that means assuming a new type of vulnerability.
The Soviet heritage. It we have counted on other occasions. To sustain this change, Russia has begun to turn to its deeper reservesreactivating T-72 tanks from the 1970s and 1980s that remained in storage for years.
This movement reveals an important turn in the contest, because it is no longer about deploying the best available, but rather to maintain volume at any price. The Russian military industry is still capable of regenerating units, but increasingly with older materialmore heterogeneous and less adapted to an environment where threats come from above and not from the front.
A battlefield that does not forgive armor. The problem from the Moscow sidewalk is that the context has radically changed. Drones, capable of detecting, tracking and attacking vehicles with great precision, have turned mechanized advances into operations andxtremely risky.
Added to this are remotely deployed mines and coordinated attacks that turn any movement in a trap. What was once the spearhead of offensives now behaves like a slow, visible and predictable target, especially when deployed in a group.
Hit logistics to wear out. In addition, a parallel strategy is added to this direct pressure on the vehicles: the continuous attack to the rear. The Ukrainian coups against fuel tankslogistics nodes and supply centers seek to make any accumulation of armored vehicles on the front meaningless.
And without fuel and maintenance, even a large number of vehicles lose operational value. Thus, the Russian problem is not only how many tanks you can deploy, but how long you can keep them functioning in real combat conditions.
Accelerate burnout. In short, Russia appears to be trading a depleting resource (the labor) for another that is also beginning to become scarce: his armored legacy of the Cold War. In the short term it may be able to sustain the pressure on the front, but if current losses continue, the material cost can quickly grow to become unsustainable.
In that scenario, the return of the tanks It does not seem to represent a return to conventional warfare, but rather a risky bet on a battlefield that has already evolved. faster than them.
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