In October 2017, at the exhibition "Zbroya ta Bezpeka" held in Kiev, the Sentinel tank support combat vehicle was presented for the first time.
Local media then talked about her as a real competitor to the Russian "Terminator". Dozens of publications were devoted to this freshly made product, a large number of television reports were shot about it. We talked about a real breakthrough in the field of armored weapons.
However, many experts were very skeptical about the "novelty". As it turned out, in fact, at the armored repair plant located in the Ukrainian capital, they took the usual restored T-64BV main battle tank intended for sending to the troops and instead of the standard tower, they put on it the Doublet combat module developed in Zhytomyr, which had already been lit up a year earlier in Amman at the SOFEX 2016 international exhibition and conference.
It is equipped with two 30-mm rapid-firing ZTM2 guns, which are clones of the Russian 2A42, a 7.62-mm machine gun, an automatic 30-mm grenade launcher and anti-tank guided missiles "Competition". Due to the fact that this module is much lighter than the tower, it was assumed that the weight of the "Guardian" would decrease, which would provide better specific power and, accordingly, improve speed and maneuverability characteristics.
At the same time, the reservation of the "Doublet" is bulletproof and the hatches of the commander and the gunner-operator located in its front part are very vulnerable even to small arms fire, so there can be no full-fledged tank support in a real battle.
Therefore, after the exhibition, the module was removed from the T-64BV and returned to the enterprise. Later it was upgraded - the Barrier ATGM and thermal imager were installed and "transplanted" to the BMP-2. However, even in this form, no one wanted to buy it.
Alexey Brusilov
