Soviet and russian infantry fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers are insufficiently protected to take part in a breakthrough of the enemy's defense, this conclusion can be drawn after six months of full-scale Russo-Ukrainian war, retired lieutenant colonel Mykola Salamakha, a specialist in the field of armored vehicles, told Espreso.TV.
"The enemy faced the fact that the protection of BTR-80, BTR-80A, BTR-82A armored personnel carriers, BMP-1, BMP-2 and even BMP-3 infantry fighting vehicles, and even more so BMD-4 and BMD-4M airborne infantry fighting vehicles is insufficient to be applied in breaking through the defense of the enemy, who uses modern anti-tank weapons. This is actually something new that we have seen in the last six months," Salamakha says.
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He also notes that russia's experience of using tank support combat vehicles, which appeared for the first time on the territory of Ukraine a couple of months ago, demonstrates that "the future is precisely behind armored combat vehicles of this class of protection" - at the same time, as Salamaha said earlier, the concept of russia’s BMPT is a dead end.
Salamakha also notes that the times when APCs were planned to be used as an armored fist when overcoming the territories hit by nuclear weapons are also gone: "Why? Because even the use of tactical nuclear weapons, according to specialists, does not always lead to the results that the command sets."
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