Drone footage has emerged of a remarkable duel between two Ukrainian Bradley fighting vehicles and the much-vaunted Russian T-90 tank, with the latter taking a sound beating and left spinning out of control before crashing into a tree.
To be clear – the US-made M-2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicle is not a tank, and on paper the Russian T-90 should have been more than a match even for two Bradleys.
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The T-90 is Russia’s top tank and Moscow has said it is the best in the world, impervious to almost any battlefield threat.
The evidence proves otherwise.
In the video, filmed at the front near the embattled city of Avdiivka, the T-90 gets in the first shot but misses.
The two Ukrainian Bradleys waste no time taking advantage of the error, making the most of the vehicles high manoeuvrability and devastating firepower.
The T-90 is equipped with a powerful 125mm smoothbore gun but can only fire seven or eight rounds a minute.
Each round from the Bradley’s 25mm gun is far less powerful but it can fire 200 a minute, the effects of which can be seen in the video.
One Bradley lays down withering fire as it moves, with the other moving in the opposite direction and firing when the first has finished.
The result is a Russian T-90 with an apparently dead driver and commander, and the tank’s turret is seen spinning wildly as it careers out of control, only stopped by a large tree.
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Summing up the video, Ukraine commentator Andrew Perpetua said in a post on social media: “A Russian T-90M couldn’t even hold its own in 1 on 1 combat with a Bradley when it had the first shot and knew the Bradley was there.
“This tank got f**king ganked.”
By some accounts, the most powerful infantry fighting vehicle not just in the war but in any army anywhere, is the US-manufactured Bradley.
The Bradley fighting vehicle appeared on battlefields in the early 1980s and is armed with a 25mm automatic cannon, a 7.62mm machine gun, and a TOW (that stands for tube-launched, optically-tracked, wireless-guided) missile system that can hit and potentially take out an armored target more than two miles away.
The fully tracked transport vehicle – of which Ukraine has around 200 – typically carries a three-man crew and a six-man infantry squad. It has a top speed of just over 41mph, so is highly mobile.
While the armored vehicles being sent are not tanks, the Bradleys provide “a level of firepower and armor that will bring advantages on the battlefield,” Pentagon spokesman General Pat Ryder said when announcing last January that they would be sent to Ukraine.
“It's not a tank, but it's a tank killer,” Ryder told reporters. “We're confident that it will aid [Ukraine] on the battlefield,” he said.
According to the video above, Ryder was bang on the money.
The Bradley’s are operated by Ukraine’s formidable 47th Separate Mechanized Brigade, also known as 'Magura'.
The 47th is a regular army unit with recruits coming from Kyiv, Dnipro, Odesa and Lviv.
It started the war as a separate assault infantry battalion, was designated to be a full-on brigade in Nov. 2022, and according to news reports its soldiers by 2023 had amassed a good deal of combat experience, fighting primarily in the Donbas sector.
Colonel Oleksandr Sak, the 47th’s commander, at age 28 is one of the Ukrainian army’s standout young combat leaders.
Much of Sak’s pre-war service was with 93rd Mechanized Brigade, an outfit that was rotated repeated to the Donbas sector in the 2015-2021 period.
The 47th It is equipped with the somewhat peculiar Slovenian upgrade T-55 tank, a Soviet-era vehicle refurbished with a NATO-standard cannon, modern optics, and reinforced armor.
But the key weapon of the 47th is the US-made Bradley infantry fighting vehicle: the fast, mobile and heavily armored personnel carrier able to go toe to toe with most Russian tanks, as we’ve just seen.
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