In 2013, Russia adopted the BTR-82A as the future of its mechanized infantry. A modern 8x8 wheeled armoured personnel carrier with a stabilized 30mm autocannon, thermal optics, satellite navigation, and a diesel engine that could start in minus forty degrees Celsius. It was supposed to lead the sweep into Kyiv in February 2022. Within three years, over 1,000 of them had been destroyed, captured, or abandoned across Ukraine. Russian soldiers started calling it meat delivery. The factory kept building them anyway.
The BTR-82A was the fourth deep modernization of a Soviet hull first adopted in 1985. The engineers at the Arzamas Machine Building Plant upgraded the engine, the cannon, the optics, and the radios. They left the armour at ten millimeters. They left the fuel tanks in the rear hull. They left the side doors that forced infantry to dismount directly into enemy fire. Hostomel, Brovary, Mariupol, Vuhledar, Avdiivka, Krynky, Kursk. Every major battle of the invasion consumed them by the dozen. Colonels died in them. A Major General of the Russian Navy died beside one. A nineteen year old prisoner summed it up in four words. We were sent as meat.
This is the story of the most destroyed armoured vehicle of the twenty first century, and the doctrine that keeps sending men inside it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2bBMxUM9UU&t=10
It is important to understand that part of why Ukrainian small drone attacks on russian armor have been so effective is because russia has refused to stop bullshitting with their armor design for decades. This isn’t to take away from the skill and innovation of Ukrainian UAV operators but rather to add another dimension to why it was such a wise strategic move for Ukraine to invest heavily in drones for antitank capability.
A Browning 0.50 cal machine gun penetrates the armor of a BTR-82a.
TL;DR the BTR-82a has shit armor unless you view it exclusively as a scout amphibious vehicle not meant for direct combat.
I saw a sub caliber 9mm from a pistol penetrate the rear armour of one of those btrs
That is insane.
I was wrong it wasn’t the btr. But as others pointed out this is the video I was speaking about.
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A 9mm subsonic round penetrating 10mm of spec armor sounds suspect, not that I doubt you for a second that it actually happened. I wonder if this is another example of Russian corruption where the hardened armor was paid for and something substantially less was actually delivered and installed.
Sub as is derived from, not subsonic. Forgotton weapons did a video on it, 6.5 CBJ. 9mm casing necked down at the end and with what is effectively speaking a sabot round in the casing.
Yeah! That’s the one I couldn’t find it for the life of me though :(
Sub caliber, not subsonic. He is probably referring to Forgotten Weapons’ video on the 6.5 CBJ.
I was indeed, but I couldn’t find the video originally
Couple that with the strategery of “throw more men at it” as their only plan, now and forever, and you’ve got a Very Bad Situatuon.
One simply cannot be proficient at war if they throw away human lives the way the russian military does.
Military power comes from understanding the power of valuing the human lives of your soldiers and experts, not becoming comfortable with dehumanizing them in suicidal mass waves…
Point of order: WWII.
The Soviet Union in WW2 was actually capable of fighting a near peer military foe. Their tanks, aircraft, artillery and other equipment were for the most part equivalent to German counterparts if inferior to a degree arguably. Whatever, I am not interested in discussing the details between Soviet Union/lend-lease equipment and German equipment but suffice to say there wasn’t a radical difference like there is today when Ukraine can field a Leopard to repel a russian T-55 with some metal junk welded to it.
By the end of WW2 The Soviet Union had learned how to Blitz, they had learned combined arms. Yes, the doctrine was inefficient in manpower, an astounding amount of people died on the eastern front but that doesn’t change the fact that russia was showing up to the battle with an analog to the military they were fighting.
Nowadays in 2025/2026 in the Ukraine War russians find themselves advancing with completely obsolete tanks, no artillery support close enough to matter, no air support and poor combined arms tactics to integrate drone recon with infantry movement and artillery.
World War 1 proved human wave tactics were pointlessly wasteful and ineffective. World War 2 only doubly emphasized that reality and the powers that refused to adapt paid dearly in loss of human life.
This is the IRL equivalent of Zerg Rush tactic.