The 'Stolen' Russian Super-Tank Britain Took Apart, And Found Bricks Where The Armour Should Be

Russia's T-90M "Proryv" was sold as an unbeatable super-tank. Then Ukraine captured one intact, the West took it apart, and found bricks packed inside the reactive armour. In September 2022, during the Kharkiv counteroffensive, soldiers of Ukraine's 92nd Separate Mechanised Brigade walked into an open field near Kurylivka and found the most advanced main battle tank in the Russian inventory sitting whole. No fire. No penetration. Optics unbroken, hatches open, crew gone. It had thrown a track, and its crew had simply left it. What followed was one of the most valuable technical exploitation windfalls of the war. The T-90M was dismantled, its armour array sampled, its optics bench-tested, its fire control read. And the tank Moscow had spent six years photographing on parade grounds began to tell a very different story about the country that built it. This documentary examines what the teardown actually found, and separates the evidence from the myth. The T-90M is not a fake. It is a genuinely modern, competently designed tank with real strengths. What it could not survive was the system standing behind it. TOPICS COVERED The capture at Kurylivka, September 2022, and why an intact tank is worth more than a hundred burned ones The T-90M Proryv explained: Relikt explosive reactive armour, the Kalina fire control system, the 125mm 2A46M-5 gun, the commander's hunter-killer sight, and the 48-tonne export logic behind the design Why Russia rationally rejected the Western tank formula after Desert Storm and Grozny The French connection: the Thales Catherine FC thermal imager inside the Sosna-U gunner's sight, and how France came to supply thermal cameras for more than a thousand Russian tanks The empty cassettes: inert reactive armour, rubber sheeting cut to size, and the destroyed T-90M photographed in September 2024 with construction bricks inside its armour boxes The carousel autoloader and the turret-throw problem Russia could not engineer out Why Shtora-1 was deleted from the T-90M, and what that admission means The Bradley duel at Stepove, 13 January 2024, and how two Ukrainian crewmen blinded a super-tank with a 25mm chain gun The British thread: DSTL, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin on "unpicking" captured Russian kit, and bespoke Challenger 2 armour The T-90A shipped to Aberdeen Proving Ground, and why almost every account of this story confuses it with the T-90M The collapse of Russian arms exports, what actually caused it, and why the teardown did not MAJOR RESEARCH SOURCES International Institute for Strategic Studies, The Military Balance, on T-90M fleet strength and production estimates Royal United Services Institute, Sam Cranny-Evans on the T-90M's armour and its exploitation value Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Trends in International Arms Transfers, March 2025 Janes, Andrew Galer on armour composition analysis UK Ministry of Defence, Defence Intelligence updates and the 2023 Defence Command Paper United States Department of Defense statements on the Aberdeen Proving Ground shipment Disclose and the French Parliament's annual arms export report on Thales and Safran licences Oryx visually confirmed loss documentation Wavell Room analysis of T-90M battlefield performance Ukrainian Ministry of Defence and Logistics Forces Command statements FURTHER READING The Military Balance, IISS, for verified inventory and production figures SIPRI Arms Transfers Database, for the export collapse in numbers Steven Zaloga, T-90 Standard Tank, Osprey New Vanguard Oryx, Attack On Europe, for the visual loss record Conflict Armament Research, on foreign components recovered from Russian systems If you have served on armour, worked in the trade, or follow the loss record more closely than is healthy, tell us what you know in the comments. Much of what is now settled about this tank was worked out in public, by people doing it for nothing. Subscribe to British War Machine for military history and defence analysis, one machine at a time. Military-history documentary, presented for educational purposes. #militaryhistory #T90M #Ukraine