A social media video of a Russian train loaded with military vehicles surfaced 20.8.2020. The video was supposedly filmed south of Saint Petersburg. While videos of Russian convoys and trains laden with tanks are not rare, there are some interesting features in this one. It seems to feature a fully functional Russian battalion tactical group. The maneuver unit is clearly based around a motorized rifle battalion that is equipped with the venerable MT-LB tracked armored personnel carriers. In the Russian system a Motorized Rifle unit can be classified as either mechanized or motorized in the west depending on the set of vehicles it is equipped with. This battalion has at least 35 baseline MT-LBs, which is consistent with the 3 vehicles per platoon and 3 platoons + ATGM-section per company structure that is typical with the battalions of the motorized rifle brigades. The battalion also has its integral command and communications assets in the form of two R-149 unified command
BMR-3M For the past ten years the Russian army has been boasting about it’s upcoming combat robots, or unmanned ground vehicles, UGV:s, as the parlance goes in the west. The focus has been on the swanky looking combat robots bristling with weapon stations and missiles. The idea of a remotely operated tank for attack operations isn’t exactly new in the Russian army. The Soviet Red Army studied and tested radio controlled teletanks already in the 1930’s. These were simple remotely operated versions of the existing T-18, T-26, T-38, BT-5 and BT-7 tanks. These early UGVs couldn’t share any sensor data with their controllers, who were traveling in the accompanying regular tanks. This resulted in aiming problems, that were solved by arming the teletanks mainly with flamethrowers, machine guns and demolition charges that didn’t rely on precision aiming. T-26 Teletank The teletanks saw their combat debut during the Winter War in 1939-40, but the success of the units were minimal, with many