Tank World Champion Killed in Ukraine War
A‘hero’ Russian world champion in an international tank warfare competition was killed when he was sent by Vladimir Putin into a real battle in Ukraine.
Bato Basanov, 25, from Buryatia, was in a recordbreaking tank biathlon team that performed last year in war games in front of defence minister Sergei Shoigu and chief of the army general staff Valery Gerasimov.
But his conflict ended in death when his tank was hit in Ukraine.
He is the latest of dozens of men from his impoverished region some 3,500 miles east of Moscow to be killed in Putin’s war.
As two bereft mothers in grief-stricken Buryatia spoke about collecting the bodies of their sons, one reportedly said to the other: ‘You’re lucky because your son’s body arrived intact. Mine came back as a head and two hands.’
Basanov, a corporal, had been hailed last year for ‘glorifying Russia by becoming a world champion in tank biathlon as part of his team’.
Uniquely, he shot without missing a single target at speeds of up to 50mph at the Alabino training ground in Moscow region.
Yet as a report from Volya Media said: ‘The death of Bato Basanov is grim confirmation that tank biathlon and real war are completely different things.’
Russian commanders Shoigu and Gerasimov saw regular tank biathlon competitions as key military prestige events, yet the huge death toll of Russian forces shows they were not ready for real war.
Basanov — whose Russian T-72B3 team beat soldiers from 19 countries in combat games including China — was shown being presented to Gerasimov, now in charge of Putin’s flailing war effort.
Yet an anonymous Russian military expert has blamed Putin’s government for botched modernisation of tanks, leaving them worse in optics and targeting technology than Ukraine’s older tanks which were upgraded with Western equipment.
‘Combat training in [Russian] tank units is disgusting,’ he added.
The ‘shortcomings’ have led to Russia’s dismal performance in the war, he said.