This is not a military vehicle. If Federal security service is involved in any sort of fight, it will be some kind of domestic counter-terrorism or anti-riot operations. It's like their militarized police and spy force combined.

FSB is basically like Russia’s militarized police and spy agency combined in one. I doubt it will use these vehicles just for riot work. FSB’s more typical tasks may include anti-terrorism and counter-insurgency. I doubt the vehicle will go anywhere near a place from where an RPG gunner can shoot it.

This guy is an offtopic trollbot. Wanna seem some pictures? Head over to flickr.

The Magnitsky Act send a message the way a teacher may scold a pupil in a classroom. “Now write on the board: Dictatorship is bad, mkay?” This is silly. There exist about a gazillion other countries to which the US does not apply standards anywhere as tough as to Russia. Let me give you one good example. Turkey. Let’s…

The Russian involvement in Syria is easily explained. See, Putin and his elite were really disappointed that they were no longer welcome in any western clubs any more, from NATO to G8. Once Russia got involved in Syria, suddenly the isolation is over and everyone wants to talk to Putin again. The US, the Arabs, Turks,…

Putin did not "spend" money on tanks and missiles the way say Arab sheikhs do. Most of Russian weapons are developed in house in Russia. So the state spending did help the big military industrial complex to survive and do well. The last decade or so, Russia was effectively the second largest weapon's exporter in the…

I'd disagree. The first brainfart that started this whole current USA-Russia standoff, started with the US Senate passing the Magnitsky Act of 2012, in fact against the wishes of the then State Department head Hillary Clinton. This was a pretty darn arrogant act that led to a series of retaliatory acts from the…

The details on the T-90 history are not exactly correct. The T-90 was originally called as T-72B2, so it was basically an updated T-72B. The T-72B, on the other hand, already surpassed the T-80 in a number of key technologies. The T-72B had rocket launchers, reactive-explosive armor (the same that T-80 had), new gun,…

T-62 wasn't really a quantity tank. From what I have heard, the T-62 production ended even before the production of T-55 it was based on ended in 1980. T-62 was basically an attempt to put a modern style turret and bigger canon on the old chassis of T-55, and that didn't work out well, resulting in complex and…

Those were the earliest T-72 versions, from back in the time when T-72 was specifically designed to be cheaper and less technologically advanced than T-64. It wasn't until 1980s that T-72 variants were brought in line with the latest standards when it was realized that T-80 was too expensive. Of course, I am not…

Unsuccessful says who? In reality, every piece of Soviet weaponry had a good share of “children’s diseases”. The example, BMP-3 was originally criticized for being too complex and unreliable, but today it is arguably the best or next to the best production IFV in the world and had a good success on the international…

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The blog is there, but it is in Russian.You can certainly ask questions in Q&A section.

Sweden supposedly was one of the countries cheerleading and assisting the Ukrainian “revolution” of 2013-14, so I’d consider that as a first strike. Anyways, I suspect Swedes are simply butthurt from the fact that the Russian tsar Peter the First knocked Sweden out of the whole “European superpower” game in the late…

Your information is slightly out of date. The Russians stopped upgrading and pretty much retired their T-64s because the T-64 factories were mostly in Ukraine. Before the 2014 war, the Ukrainians also retired most of their T-72 tanks or put them in reserve because T-72 was mostly built in Russia. However, the…

Your information is slightly out of date, because various modernization programs brought the T-72, T-80, and T-64 more or less to the same page already in the 1980s. There is a well known Ukrainian engineer and blogger who argues that the endless proliferation of soviet tanks of the same type (T-72, T-90, T-80 all…

That would be useless, because the M1 would be a tank that the Ukrainians don't know how to repair or upgrade. On the other hand, Ukrainians have factories where T-64 and T-80 used to be assembled, and they have tons of spare parts for those tanks dating back to the Soviet era.

It's pretty sad when the F1 Commission spends time unnecessarily tweaking inconsequential rules such as these ones instead of fixing what's currently broken with F1.

The fancy airplanes are already flying high above MANPAD range. The ones that will be more vulnerable will be the helicopters. A better question is how the USA will react once the MANPAD systems it sold to Saudis will suddenly end up out in the wild some place in the middle east. Just imagine if ISIS gets hold of…

One problem here is that America has already labeled Assad regime as an “undesirable”, and the American foreign policy can be both arrogant and stubborn. If you look back at Vietnam war, everyone understood just after a couple of years that Vietnam was a major fuckup, yet it took more than a decade to get out of…