Polish T-72 Tank - Tank Museum, Bovington

Описание: An ex Polish Army T-72M1 tank, in the arena at The Tank Museum, Bovington, England for the Spring Tiger Day 2022 event.
The T-72 is the most widely used main battle tank in the world. It has been manufactured in six countries, is in service with the armies of 35 nations and has fought in all the major wars of the last 20 years.

The striking feature of T-72 is the low profile. This is achieved by careful design but in particular by the elimination of the loader who, because he has to work standing up, largely dictates the height of a tank. He is replaced in this vehicle by a mechanical auto-loader, which can feed the gun at any angle with a separate projectile and charge case. The ammunition is arranged around the turret rather like the carousel of a slide projector. Ammunition stowage is limited, the rounds are unprotected so there is a high fire risk, the mechanical equipment is prone to break down and the rate of fire, due to the action of the auto-loader, is slow. The 'Achilles heel' of this ammunition storage and feed system has become all too obvious, with the fate of large numbers of Russian T-72 tanks, during the Russian invasion and occupation of large parts of Eastern Ukraine with defending Ukrainian military forces having great success in outmanoeuvring and destroying the Russian T-72s with many of them exploding and their turrets being blown off by their own ammunition.

The T-72 is a family of Soviet/Russian main battle tanks that entered production in 1969. The T-72 was a development of the T-64, which was troubled by high costs and its reliance on immature developmental technology. About 25,000 T-72 tanks have been built, and refurbishment has enabled many to remain in service for decades. It has been widely exported and has seen service in 40 countries and in numerous conflicts. The T-90 introduced in 1992 is a development of the T-72B; production and development of various modernized T-72 models continues today.

The T-72 was the most common tank used by the Warsaw Pact from the 1970s until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. It was also exported to other countries, such as Finland, India, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Yugoslavia, as well as being copied elsewhere, both with and without licenses.

Licensed versions of the T-72 were made in Poland and Czechoslovakia, for Warsaw Pact consumers. These tanks had better and more consistent quality but with inferior armour, lacking the resin-embedded ceramics layer inside the turret front and glacis plate armour, replaced with all steel. Many parts and tools are not interchangeable between the Soviet, Polish and Czechoslovakian versions, which caused logistics problems.

The T-72M is an export version, similar to the T-72A but lacking composite armour (decreasing the weight to 37 tonnes), with a much simpler fire control system, and usually supplied with inferior ammunition compared to the Soviet army standard. These were also built in Poland and former Czechoslovakia.

The T-72 has seen extensive service in the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine with both sides.

Russia's most numerous tanks are the T-72B3 and the older T-72B. In the buildup to the invasion, of Ukraine, Russian forces applied improvised steel grilles to the top of the turret. Military analysts have speculated that such grilles were added in an attempt to counter the usage of top-attack weapons, such as the US made FGM-148 Javelin and British-Swedish NLAW, by Ukrainian forces. This adds weight to the tank, increases its visual profile, and makes it more difficult for the crew to escape from the tank. They may be potentially used as a countermeasure against RPG-7s fired from above during urban combat, loitering munitions, or against drone attacks, as a response to lessons learned from the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war. The lack of uniformity between the makeshift cage variants made from different meshes and iron fences suggest that they are improvised by the tank crews, and are not standard issue. In May 2022, some Russian tankers said they eventually removed the cages, as they obstructed the use of machine guns and radios, and prevented evacuation if the tank caught fire.

Before the invasion, Ukraine operated small numbers of T-72s which were left from the Soviet Union but were partly modernized. These mainly included T-72As and T-72AVs, as well as modernized T-72AMTs (mod. 2017). On 3 April, an image of a rare T-72 "Ural" (1973) equipped with Kontakt-1 ERA having been damaged appeared. As of April 2022, an unspecified number of Czech T-72M1s had been provided to Ukraine. Poland also donated over 200 T-72M1/M1R tanks to Ukraine.

As of 8 October 2022, the open-source intelligence site, Oryx has visually confirmed the loss of 779 Russian T-72s and 55 Ukrainian T-72s.

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