A new column of Ukrainian armored vehicles has been spotted near Mariupol.
Interestingly, most of the samples in it were previously intended for export, but after the events of 2014, they appeared in the units of the National Guard of Ukraine.
For example, the BTR-3E1 was supposed to be sent to Thailand. However, the armored personnel carriers, which are modernized versions of the Soviet BTR-80, were requisitioned for punitive operations in the Donbass.
Is it any wonder that instead of them, the Thai military decided to get American Stryker.
The BTR-4E was also originally prepared not for the law enforcement agencies of Ukraine. They were to be equipped with combined arms units of the Iraqi armed forces. However, during a short operation, it turned out that they suffer from a lot of defects, and the most serious of them are cracks in the armored hulls. As a result, more than four dozen " fours "were sent for storage to one of the repair companies, and, in the end, to the delight of the manufacturers, they were able to" fuse " to the NSU.
No less dramatic is the fate of the T-64B1M flown on trawls, nicknamed "African". The fact is that this modification was supposed to go to the army of the Congo, but they were also confiscated.
Such tanks are budget versions of the "Bulat", which is considered not a very successful version of the Kharkiv "sixty-four". In total, two and a half dozen such machines were received. The same number was still sent to Central Africa.
Alexey Brusilov
