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By Isabel van Brugen
News Reporter
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Russian tank repairmen in the Belgorod region have reportedly blown up a T-72 tank they were repairing, causing damage to two other tanks.
On Thursday evening, a fire broke out at a tank repair base in Belgorod, located near Russia's border with Ukraine, according to Baza, a Russian Telegram channel that regularly posts information about security issues within the country.
The fire, which reportedly started due to a violation of fire safety during repairs, caused ammunition to detonate, destroying one tank and damaging two others nearby.
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Firefighters arrived at the scene two hours after the fire, and it was extinguished in half an hour. There were no reported casualties, said Baza.
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The T-72 tank has played a key role in the Russian military throughout the conflict that began when Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded neighboring Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine publishes on its Facebook page Ukrainian estimates of the total losses Russia has faced since the invasion began. It estimates that so far, Russia has lost a total of 3,098 tanks in the conflict.
Multiple videos have circulated on social media in recent months which appear to show Russia taking out its Soviet-era tanks from storage to be deployed in the Ukraine war.
In September, Anton Gerashchenko, adviser to Ukraine's minister of internal affairs, shared a clip on his Twitter page that appears to show multiple 50-year-old T-62 tanks lined up on railway tracks in Russia.
"Old Soviet tanks taken out of conservation by Russia - with no protection against modern weapons," the adviser to the Ukrainian government tweeted. "And new Russian conscripts (also with no protection against modern weapons and a modern army - we've seen what they fight in). Perfect combination, doomed for success, I would say."
It wasn't clear when or where the footage was filmed.
The British Ministry of Defence said as far back as May that Russia had moved 50-year-old T-62 tanks from "deep storage" to be deployed for use by its Southern Grouping of Forces (SGF), and that such vehicles are likely to be "particularly vulnerable" to anti-tank weapons.
The T-72 main battle tanks replaced the T-62 units, which were in production in the Soviet Union from 1961 to 1973.
Russia rarely releases figures on losses of personnel and equipment. So far, the Kremlin has confirmed the deaths of fewer than 6,000 troops and fewer than 4,000 additional fighters drawn from Russia's so-called "people's republics" in Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts.
Newsweek reached out to Russia's Defense Ministry for comment.
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