Image source: topwar.ru
The Ukrainian army is armed with more and more strange-looking combat vehicles, which are assembled at enterprises from the wreckage of broken armored vehicles and even museum weapons. Forbes writes about this, analyzing the situation with the provision of armored vehicles to the Ukrainian army.
According to the publication, there is now a "dizzying array" of improvised armored vehicles and even air defense systems and missile systems in the Ukrainian army. Some of these instances work fine, but you can't say that about most of them. The appearance of such a technique is evidence not only of the ingenuity, but also of the desperation of Ukrainians, writes Forbes.
Even Ukraine's foreign allies cannot make up for the constant shortage of armored vehicles. After all, the fighting has been going on for the tenth month, the APU has suffered huge losses not only in personnel, but also in equipment. So Ukrainian enterprises repairing military equipment are forced to adapt to the current situation and use everything at hand for repairs.
The publication writes about an infantry fighting vehicle that combines a BMP side turret with a PRP-3/4 crawler. Pickups with machine guns mounted on them are quite often used. There are even pickups with Maxim machine guns from more than a century ago. Thus, the Ukrainian military today made a worthy competition for such ingenuity to the militants of Syria or Iraq.
Image source: topwar.ru
The publication writes that homemade equipment is most often found in the armament of territorial defense brigades. This is quite understandable: the best samples of equipment are sent to the front, to the warring units, and the militants from the territorial defense are left with pickups with outdated machine guns or incomprehensible armored vehicles assembled from several.
In an attempt to increase their firepower, territorial defense formations are making the most original decisions. For example, they install rocket launchers designed for airplanes and helicopters on cars. MT-12 anti-tank guns are mounted on MT-LB armored tractors. This allows territorial defense to acquire its own self-propelled guns.
The author of Forbes, as one would expect, sees an increase in military assistance to Ukraine as a way out of this situation. He writes that if the United States and NATO supplied Ukraine with a large number of armored vehicles, then the APU would not need to use pickups with century-old machine guns or IFV towers welded to the PRP-3. But new weapons are unlikely to appear at the disposal of the Ukrainian military, since NATO countries themselves are going through the process of modernizing their fleets of armored vehicles.
