Russia Should Be Ashamed of the T-14 Armata Tank

The T-14 Is Just a Waste of Rubles 

Russia unveiled its T-14 Armata tank for the first time in 2015 at the annual Victory Day Parade in Moscow. But a T-14 broke down during the procession of armored vehicles—right as it was rolling through Red Square.

In a bit of quick thinking, the parade narrator dreamed up a cover story on the spot to defuse any embarrassment the mechanical failure might have caused.

He announced over a loudspeaker that the tank grinding to a halt had been planned in advance—it was a rehearsal for any emergency scenario that might unfold during the parade.

This episode from the Armata’s infancy more or less encapsulates the history of the T-14 and its performance in the Ukraine War.

It is a sophisticated machine—too sophisticated in some ways. Indeed, it was too advanced to use in the brutal combat environment of Ukraine.

“Like one of these ultra-expensive Italian sportscars sitting in the showroom, the T-14 deceptively seems like a mechanical marvel,” said a Ukrainian defense company executive who spoke to 19FortyFive. “That is, until you start driving it, and then the shortcomings of its high-tech design shatter any illusions about its practicality.”

The T-14’s Design: Catching Up With the West

“There is a lot of hype about the T-14 in this country, and in Europe, and how safe its design is for the crew,” said a retired U.S. Army flag-rank officer who was involved with the design of the original M1 tank. “We had decided with the M1 [Abrams] for numerous reasons to make the crew’s survivability paramount.

“This is why we separated people from munitions inside of a crew-space capsule. This way there would never be an incident where a spark or other fire created by a hit would get to the ammunition and cause the tank to ‘brew up’ and kill everyone on-board,” the officer continued. “So, for the first time ever the Russians have designed a tank that has the same safeguards. They are only 40 years behind us in doing so.”

But the T-14’s performance in Ukraine has shown that this effort to “catch up” with the West created myriad problems.

The tank was meant to be a force multiplier on the battlefield, and designing a tank that mimicked certain traits of the M1 may have seemed like a good idea at the time.

But the Abrams itself has in fact underwhelmed in Ukraine, and the Russians have suffered the same kind of disappointing performance from the Armata in the conflict.

T-14 Armata: Too Expensive To Use

The T-14 was a “cutting edge” design, and its systems were major departures from previous Russian tank configurations. For one, the tank is often described as “highly computerized”—so much that it could operate as an unmanned tank.

But this significant increase in the digitization of the platform created no small number of problems with reliability. The tank boasts an impressive array of various sensors, but these are vulnerable to battlefield conditions and affected by austere environments.

This vulnerability puts further emphasis on another problem: the cost of the tank.

The T-14 Armata is estimated to cost between $5 million-9 million per copy. Sergei Chemzov, the head of national defense-industrial consortium Rostec, and a long-time close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin (the ultimate “Friend of Vlad,” said a Moscow-based correspondent I spoke to) has officially stated that the T-14 is “too expensive” to be fielded in Ukraine.

The prospect of the Armata going against hordes of drones and the varied arsenal of anti-tank missiles used by the Ukrainians prompted Chemezov to tell Russian news agencies that “it is easier for the Russian military to buy older T-90s”—a previous-generation main battle tank—than it is to field the T-14 in Ukraine.

This seems to be the tank’s destiny, for now as well as into the future. The rates of losses in high-end conflict, and the need for simpler, easier-to-repair weapons, make the T-14 Armata impractical.

T-14 Armata: A Story in Photos 

About the Author: Reuben F. Johnson 

Reuben F. Johnson is a survivor of the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and is now an Expert on Foreign Military Affairs with the Fundacja im. Kazimierza Pułaskiego in Warsaw. He has been a consultant to the Pentagon, several NATO governments and the Australian government in the fields of defense technology and weapon systems design. Over the past 30 years he has resided in and reported from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Brazil, the People’s Republic of China and Australia.