Videos show Vladimir Putin sending tanks as old as him to the war in a desperate bid to slow Ukraine’s counteroffensive.
The 70-year-old dictator has raided museums and rusting storage depots to send Stalin’s old T-54s and T-55s to fight another day.
One train carrying these rejuvenated Soviet tanks is seen crossing Crimea in recent days heading for the war zone.
Another shows them in Voronezh region, which borders Ukraine.
The movement of the mothballed tanks is clear evidence of Putin’s desperation as one of his most senior aides admits NATO is stymieing his efforts to crush Ukraine.
The T-54 was originally produced by Stalin after the Second World War in 1946, but Putin seems to be sending to war an updated version from the early 1950s - some 70 years old, the same age as the dictator who is fond of boasting of his hypersonic prowess.
Several months ago Russia started moving his antiquated war machines westward from Arsenyev in Primorsky region, where the 1295th Central Tank Reserve and Storage Base is located.
One theory is that Russia has turned them into “kamikaze tanks” able to operate on “autopilot” loaded with explosives acting as self-propelled bombs.
A recent video showed an apparently reborn Soviet tank designed as a kamikaze self-propelled mobile bomb to inflict carnage on Ukrainian positions.
In this case it hit a landmine and exploded near Marinka in Donetsk region before reaching the enemy.
But analysts suggest the raiding of Russian museums and mothballing storages may have had the ulterior motive is repurposing Stalin’s tanks as kamikaze battlefield killers.
Other reports suggest the tanks have been refitted at factories in the Urals.
Either way, the trains show Putin is sending these war machines to the frontline
An eyewitness in Voronezh said: “Oh f***, these tanks are as ancient as woolly mammoth’s poo.
“T-55! They ran out of new tanks and are sending junk.”
This comes as the deputy head of Putin’s security council Dmitry Medvedev, formally Russian president from 2008 to 2012, denied his armed forces were out of date.
He claimed “our army is modern and heroic” before admitting the Russian military had “certain problems”.
Medvedev claimed Russia would win the war if NATO stopped backing Ukraine, while also hinting darkly that Putin could go nuclear.
“If NATO, and primarily the United States and its vassals, were to stop supplying Ukraine with ammunition, the Special Military Operation would have been finished in several months,” he said.
“If they stop the supply of their weapons now, then the Special Military Operation will end in a few days…
“Any war, even a World War, can be finished really quickly.
“Either by signing a peace treaty, or by doing what Americans did in 1945, when they used their nuclear weapons and bombed two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
“They then indeed curtailed the military campaign.
“The price was the lives of almost 300,000 people.”
Medvedev for four years had his finger on the Russian nuclear trigger.
The Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT) has said the first modifications of the T-54were adopted by the Soviet army in the second half of the 1940s, and the T-55 in 1958.
Key shortcomings of these tanks are a lack of rangefinders and ballistic computers, primitive sights, and inadequate gun stabilisation.
