Putin’s prized tanks ‘vulnerable’, says UK

VLADIMIR Putin’s prized £3million ‘state-of-the-art’ tanks are proving vulnerable to rocket attacks, according to British experts.

UK military intelligence officials yesterday said that the T-90M tank – the most formidable in the Russian army – is falling victim to Ukrainian missile attacks which have turned them into heaps of mangled, blackened metal. ‘The system’s upgraded armour, designed to counter anti-tank weaponry, remains vulnerable if unsupported by other force elements,’ a Ministry of Defence briefing said. Sophisticated armour on the T-90M is designed to explode when struck by an anti-tank missile, blunting the penetrative power of the incoming round.

But US-made Javelin missiles being used by Ukrainian troops are fitted with two warheads – one to destroy the reactive armour and the other to pierce the chassis beneath. As a result, dozens of

T-90Ms are among the estimated 1,100 Russian tanks that Ukraine claims to have destroyed or incapacitated since the war began.

It was also reported yesterday that a ‘hero’ Russian world champion in an international tank warfare competition had been killed in Ukraine three weeks after the invasion. Bato Basanov had been part of a victorious tank biathlon team that beat 19 other nations last year in military war games in Moscow.

The 25-year-old was from Buryatia, a mountainous Russian republic in eastern Siberia.

He is the latest of dozens of men from his impoverished region, 3,500 miles east of Moscow, to be killed in Putin’s war.