Image source: vestnik-rm.ru
At the end of February 1995, in the cemeteries of military equipment at the Chervlennaya station and in the vicinity of Grozny, where combat vehicles that had failed for various reasons were collected from all over Chechnya, one could see the damaged T-72A tanks with the remnants of white camouflage on the towers. There were quite a lot of them.
In November 1994, as part of a hastily formed battalion of tank soldiers from various parts of the Moscow Military District, they supported an attempt by the forces of the Provisional Council of the Chechen Republic to take control of Grozny, controlled by the Dudaev separatists.
To make it easier for them to be identified from the air by the Mi-24 helicopters and Su-25 attack aircraft, the towers were ordered to be painted white.
On November 26, 1994, 40 tanks with the support of approximately 1,200 militia entered the capital. Of course, it was simply impossible to take the city in such a "single regiment", so efforts were focused on key facilities, such as the presidential palace, the television center, etc.
There is a lot of contradictory information about how events unfolded, but there is a lot of evidence that there was no fighting as such at first. The tanks, having reached the points indicated by them, stopped, and the "living force" supporting them simply dispersed.
Then the separatist militants simply began to shoot the "seventy-second" from the RPG, and some of them turned out to be without crews at all. Some of the tanks exploded as a result. 21 tankmen were captured. The number of dead anti-Dudaev is unknown. The numbers vary from a few dozen to several hundred.
It is still unknown exactly how many vehicles were destroyed, according to some estimates, about 15 tanks. About two dozen were captured by the opposing side, and then they were used in Grozny, already against the Russian army.
During the fighting in January, some were put out of action, and some were simply abandoned by the militants, they were taken out to Chervlennaya, and then sent for disposal.
Lev Romanov
