Russia hasn’t confirmed it is deploying the T-55 to the front line and the Ministry of Defense in Moscow did not respond to CNN’s request for comment. US to begin training Ukrainian forces on Abrams tanks next month U.S Soldiers assigned to Alpha Company 3rd Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment, 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division (3-1 ABCT) operationally controlled by the 1st Infantry Division (1 ID), operate a M1A1 Abrams to engage a simulated opposing force while conducting amphibious assault training during the Bull Run training exercise at Bemowo Piskie, Poland, Nov. Cheap, reliable, easy to use and easy to maintain, it was a military mainstay from Egypt to China to Sudan, where they are still in use. “From the mid-50s onwards, there was this concept that tried to come up with a tank that could do a bit of everything and that became known as the main battle tank.”įor the Red Army, that was the T-55 and its many variants, which later became the most widely produced tank in the world, with more than 100,000 units built. “Up until that point, you’d had three very distinctive types of tanks, light, medium and heavy, which had different roles on the battlefield,” Delaney said.

“This was the first main battle tank used by the Soviet Union in the Cold War era,” said historian John Delaney, a senior curator at the Imperial War Museum (IWM) in Duxford, Cambridge, as he shows one to CNN. They’re so old, you can find them in museums. The tanks are T-55s, a model first commissioned by the Soviet Union’s Red Army in 1948, shortly after the end of World War II. Moscow has been known to bring out older military equipment from storage to help it prosecute the war in Ukraine, but these are different. The video, seemingly filmed in late March, shows old Soviet tanks being transported, somewhere in Russia. “This is the second train, there was one like it just before.” “Wow,” a woman says, pointing her camera phone at the convoy. A cargo train loaded with tanks chugs along under the crisp, spring sun.

What battle was tanks first used