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Bofferbrauer2 said:
What's interesting is that their Tank losses are way down. I speculate that they're slowly running out of good tanks and an increasing amount of divisions are now only equipped with BMP at best. According to the Oryx blog, Russia has lost almost as many tanks as they do IFV, and almost twice as much as their AFV and APC taken together. However, those latter categories are much easier and faster to produce than any tanks, especially when the "produced" numbers are mostly just refurbished and upgraded old tanks. The question is if Russia is going to buy some old T-62 from North Korea to remedy this somewhat. In fact, it could be that Russia didn't "find" the T54/55 (as they mentioned years before the invasion that they all got scrapped) and some of their T-62 in Russia, but bought them cheaply off North Korea, since the latter still had around 1000 to up to 1600 of those T54/55 and 800 T-62 (not counting the locally-produced Chonma-Ho, which got several upgrades over the years, but some of those are probably still baseline T-62) standing around. Since NK is constantly producing new tanks (2020 estimates set their half-decent tank forces, as in later Chonma-Ho models as well as the Pokpung-Ho, which incorporates some tech from the T-72 and T-90, at around 1500 tanks in total) and the T54/55 can't pierce shit anymore with their main gun, getting rid of those old things to make space for new ones, especially with some fresh tech from Russia added, makes perfect sense for them. This is especially true as they are readying a brand-new tank called the Cheonma-2, which seems to be more comparable to a modern western MBT rather than their other tanks which seem to be often 2-3 decades behind in tech. |
Russia already buys North Korean shells. They have expanded the arrangement with troops, and may have tanks as you've said. The North Koreans though are very small and are probably shorter than average of east asians (who aren't tall to begin with) because they eat so little. You see dwarfism sometimes as an adaptation sometimes with animals that get trapped on an island or something where there isn't a lot of food. So, using those tanks would be quite difficult for the Russians, because Russians are tall strapping men. They could put the shortest russians into the tanks but the inflexibility in positions means that they would do a piss poor job of being a tanker.
Being cramped would hinder their effectiveness and make them hate their jobs lol. I'm fine with that, i hate the invasion and it's a war so i hope they hate fighting ukraine.
