The soldiers sent to Ukraine by Russian President Vladimir Putin received armored vehicles produced during the Soviet Union, under Joseph Stalin or Nikita Khrushchev.

The Ministry of Defense of Great Britain referred to this on February 6, indicating in the assessment of the mentioned day that “in recent days, for the first time, BTR-50, Russian armored personnel carriers were also on the front in Ukraine. certain troops entered service in 1954.”

A photo appeared on social networks confirming the presence of this armored vehicle in the armament of the invasion forces, obtained by the administrators of the Ukraine Weapons Tracker page.

They do not specify how they managed to obtain the picture, which is believed to have been taken in a warehouse of the Russian army, but specify that the photo most likely shows the BTR-50PU, a command model that entered service with the Russian armed forces in 1958 .

The basic models of the BTR-50 were developed in 1952, when the Soviet state was still ruled by Joseph Stalin, and entered service with the armed forces of Moscow in 1954, a year after the death of the dictator.

They were produced until the 1970s, when they began to be replaced by more modern BMP-1. At the moment, BTR-50 armored personnel carriers are at the disposal of several countries, mainly in the third world, but it is not clear to what extent they are actually still in service or stored in long-term military warehouses.

Romania, for example, withdrew them from use in the 90s, a copy is now on display at the King Ferdinand I National Military Museum in Bucharest.

What Ukrainian analysts write about the “new” armored vehicles of the Russian troops

The Ukrainian site “Military News”, which received photos of the transportation of this armored vehicle by rail to the front on February 23, notes that “at the moment it is difficult to accurately explain the reason for the restoration of such archaic equipment, the youngest of which is already 50 years old, when it is in the same warehouse where it was taken and BTR-50, quite modern and much better tracked armored vehicles MT-LB.

“Apparently, the incredible amount of lost equipment during the first year of the war and mobilization created such a demand for armored vehicles in the Russian army that the Russian industry simply cannot satisfy in a reasonable time,” Ukrainian military analysts also note.

While it’s easy to suspect bias, similar claims were made by military analysts contacted by Forbes in February to comment on the appearance on the front of a new model of a tank retrofitted by the Russians with a 50-year-old performance system. .

The Russian army does not have very good “eyes” for preserved tanks

In this case, it was an old T-62 tank photographed by the Russian military, whose combat mechanism was modernized by installing a 1PN96МТ-02 infrared targeting device. The Russian army will call this new version of the tank “T-62M arr. 2022”.

At the time, Forbes noted that the 1PN96МТ-02 would have been considered an advanced system in the 1970s, and that Russia actually has the more advanced Sosna-U targeting system installed on the latest generation of T-90 tanks. of the Russian army, as well as in some advanced T-80 and T-72 combat vehicles.

However, Forbes says the main problem with the Sosna-U system is that it requires high-quality electronic components made in France, which Russian industry seems unable to reproduce and which Moscow can no longer import due to sanctions imposed by Paris against after the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014.

“It is clear that the Russian industry cannot reproduce the Sosna-U so quickly as to keep up with the regeneration of old tanks,” Forbes agency emphasizes in an article published on February 25.

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