Vladimir Putin is pushing Russia into the past
Maybe by a generation, maybe by a century
THE PANTSIR-S1 is an impressive beast, almost 17 tonnes of top-notch hardware capable of shooting down planes tens of kilometres away. The specimen photographed not far from Kherson, though, was a sorry spectacle; its missile-tubes bristled like porcupine quills, but it was axle-deep in mud—one of nearly 1,000 pieces of Russian equipment destroyed, damaged, abandoned or captured by Ukraine over two weeks of war.
Seeing the Pantsir on social media, Trent Telenko, a former auditor in America’s defence bureaucracy, noticed a telltale detail which spoke of very poor maintenance: its tyres were in terrible nick. Worse still, they were cheap Chinese knock-offs of the tyres you might have expected on such a vehicle, observed Jon Hawkes of Janes, a defence-intelligence firm; they would have been unable to support the vehicle fully loaded.
This article appeared in the Briefing section of the print edition under the headline "The great leap backward"
From the March 10th 2022 edition
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