Problems for Ukrainian counter-attacks, mechanised perspective and ammunitions.

Although some people think the tank is obsolete, these people have been around since the invention of the tank. The appearance of the "Shaped Charge" combined into a recoilless gun in the German Panzerfaust of 1943 along with mass distribution of the same was heralded as the end of the tank back then already.

This debate of whether the tank is finished comes up every generation, helicopters in theory would make tanks unusable, in general, the problems presented by the emergence of new threats to tanks are countered with as many technologies and countermeasures.

This war is no different, many Russian tanks have been destroyed by ATGMs, but really, there is no alternative to tanks in any army, new technologies such as APS will be necessary, but that is beyond the scope of this article, which is to discuss the problems Ukrainian units will have in mounting effective counter-attacks.

The fundamental problem that tanks solve today is the same problem that gave rise to their appearance in the trenches of the First World War. This problem is that of assaulting fortified positions.

I don't think it is necessary to explain that if you have to walk into a building from which bullets are coming at you, the experience may not be a very pleasant one to say the least.

As I said, Russian tanks have faced modern ATGMs without being equipped with the most modern countermeasures, this technical difficulty of 1vs1 on the technical level is however overcome in the Russian case with other auxiliary elements on the tactical level, such as the use of aircraft and helicopters to detect and defeat the threat, better optics than the Ukrainians and a longer range have evened the scales. The Russians have therefore been able to mount successful offensives.

We must therefore take into account the opposite side, i.e. the Ukrainian offensive. All the defensive elements that the Ukrainians have to defeat Russian assaults (such as ATGMs) are also present on the Russian side, not only that, but the Ukrainians do not have these other advantages to rely on such as aviation. I started the article talking about the central role of the tank in the assaults, and it is here where I will emphasize a little mentioned fact and that is the Ukrainian ammunition and that is another great disadvantage.

Although the most important function of tanks is the offensive, where they are vital, they can also be useful in the defensive, although here they are not vital. Given the abundance of tanks in the Russian army it will not be difficult to see tanks in defensive roles in Ukrainian offensives. Tank-to-tank battles are likely to be encountered and have probably already taken place. It is therefore important to analyse which tank has superiority over the other, without going into the capabilities of each tank in different aspects, we will focus on two. The ability to attack against other tanks (the gun) and the ability to defend against it. For this we will talk about ammunition, especially Ukrainian ammunition, as the article is about Ukrainian offensive capabilities in the mechanised area, key to the assault as I said.

Before the war the best ammunition available for Ukrainian tanks was the 3BM42 "Mango", this projectile is not modern at all, some of you may think, well neither are Russian tanks, the problem is that this projectile is old even for the dates when Russian tanks started to appear. That is to say, if Russian tanks are old, these shells are old, old, old.

The penetration capability of this shell into other armoured units is poor:

650 mm at 0° at 2000 m, 300 mm at 60° at 2000 m (with Mango-M and 3VBM23 projectile).

Its penetration is so bad that it is probably incapable of penetrating Russia's older tanks - a T-72B with Kontakt 5 has armour capable of defeating such a munition, and this is 1980s technology.

Russia also has most of its tanks in Ukraine with superior protection.

Likewise, we now have confirmation from photos of a captured tank that the Ukrainians have been forced to use the relic 3BK14M, introduced in 1968 and with a penetration of 450mm. So basically the idea of taking on another tank becomes even crazier.

Not only that, but this model of ammunition is not only an old design, but the ammunition itself is probably old and certainly stored in far from ideal conditions. The ammunition has a number of chemical elements that degrade, and this degradation ranges from loss of effectiveness to risk to the firing tank itself and its crew.

As I said before, such situations where one adversary has an advantage in a technical area over the other are common in any confrontation, from boxing matches where one fighter is taller than the other to armed conflicts. The duty of the disadvantaged combatant is therefore to find strengths with which to counter the disadvantage. As I said, air superiority is a good way to counter such disadvantages. 

The problem for the Ukrainians is that if they have few of these advantages in defence, they have none in offence.

It must be mentioned: all Russian shells can penetrate Ukrainian armour.