Just a few days after the first Abrams tanks received by the Ukrainians arrived at the front line, the first losses, confirmed by photo-video, appeared. A Ukrainian Abrams M1A1 tank would have been shot down by Russian forces near Avdiivka, a city captured by the Russians after more than four months of fighting.

The first Ukrainian Abrams tank destroyed by the RussiansPhoto: Twitter snapshot

Drone footage shows an Abrams M1A1 tank apparently driving alone in a nearby area. Later, other images show him on fire and badly damaged.

It is also not known what happened to the Ukrainian crew.

The images, which appeared on Monday, quickly spread on social networks, as if the attack happened on the same day.

Ukraine would leave the Abrams tanks for the spring battles

The American publication Businesses Insider wrote a few months ago that although the US has been supplying Ukraine with Abrams M1A1 tanks for some time, the Ukrainian army has not yet used them in combat and will leave them for new battles this spring.

31 tanks of this type arrived in Ukraine in September, but were seen in battle just a few days ago.

According to American experts, the leadership of the Armed Forces would have kept the tanks for a new counteroffensive, but the information remained unclear.

Currently, the Ukrainian army has 3 main models of Western-made tanks

About 200 Ukrainian servicemen were trained at American military bases in Germany to operate Abrams tanks, during the training a joint military exercise was also conducted, which simulates actions with battalion forces.

The US has already promised and delivered the first of 31 M1A1 tanks to Ukraine since September.

Abrams tanks are the third model of heavy battle tank that Ukraine receives, after the Challenger 2 tanks received from Great Britain and the Leopard 2 tanks provided by several NATO countries, in particular Poland and Germany.

They were joined by Leopard-1 tanks, the predecessors of the most modern Leopard model, but it is currently unknown how many units of this type Ukraine received, as many of them required repair and restoration before being sent into battle. .

The Ukrainian army also received several Soviet-made tanks that were extensively modernized in NATO countries after the collapse of the USSR, such as the M-55C model donated by Slovenia.