Ukraine Drone Forces Crew to Abandon Russia's Prized T-90 Tank: Video

A single, cheap Ukrainian drone has forced the crew of a Russian T-90M tank to bail out of the prized vehicles along the front lines, new footage appears to show.

A brief video clip circulating online, originally posted by Ukraine's land forces on Tuesday, looks to show a Ukrainian first-person-view (FPV) drone barreling into the advanced Russian tank. A dual view appears to show both the feed from an airborne Ukrainian drone and the attack drone before it hits the armored vehicle.

The footage is attributed to Ukraine's 47th Mechanized Brigade, but Newsweek could not independently verify the footage, and has reached out to the Russian Defense Ministry for comment via email.

Elements of the brigade—which has been operating Western-supplied Leopard 2A6 main battle tanks—had been stationed around the Donetsk town of Avdiivka, and previously fought in hotspots around the southern Zaporizhzhia region.

Dmytro Lazutkin, spokesperson for the 47th Brigade, told Newsweek earlier this month that the brigade was deployed around the northern flank of Avdiivka, adding Moscow had upped its own usage of FPV drones around the embattled town.

Ukraine needs more of its own FPV drones, just as much as it needs ammunition, Lazutkin said.

Ukraine's military has wielded FPV kamikaze drones to great effect. The FPV uncrewed vehicles have quickly become "a game-changer" on the Ukrainian battlefield, taking out masses of Russian hardware, said Mykhailo Fedorov, Kyiv's minister of digital transformation, who is at the helm of Ukraine's drone efforts against Russia.

"They work sometimes even more efficiently than artillery," Kyiv's drone tsar told Newsweek in early December. "So, FPV drones are indeed a tech revolution, even though the tech itself is quite easy. But it turned out to be very efficient."

These cheap drones have been known to take out tanks, like Russia's T-90s. In mid-August, Ukraine's 80th Air Assault Brigade posted a clip it said showed a drone strike on a T-90 tank that had tumbled off a cliff in the war-torn country. In late October, Ukraine's Defense Ministry released a video appearing to show an explosive drone targeting, then hitting, a Russian T-90 tank.

Russia has lauded its T-90M tank, also known as "Proryv-3," or "Breakthrough-3." In late December 2022, Russian state media reported that the T-90M had been deployed to Ukraine for the first time.

The T-90M Proryv "seems impressive, but Russian tanks always look good until they are actually used in combat," military technology and defense expert Michael Peck told Newsweek in March 2023. The T-90M is broadly comparable to the U.S. Army's M1 Abrams main battle tank, a number of which are now in Ukraine.

Disclaimer: The copyright of this article belongs to the original author. Reposting this article is solely for the purpose of information dissemination and does not constitute any investment advice. If there is any infringement, please contact us immediately. We will make corrections or deletions as necessary. Thank you.