Western military equipment supplied to Ukraine has a whole array of flaws, a well-informed source has told Sputnik.
The source referred to Russian defense experts, who looked into trophy pieces of Ukrainian military hardware, which were earlier seized during the course of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine.
These include the German-made Leopard 2 tanks, the US Bradley infantry fighting vehicles and France’s AMX-10RC light tank.
The source said that the captured Western equipment is being explored by a wide pool of specialists from various companies of the Russian military-industrial complex. According to the insider, tests of the captured NATO equipment wrapped up with preliminary results that “generally meet expectations.”
“In particular, the tests have showed that Western military hardware has an acceptable level of armor protection, but on the other hand, this equipment has extremely mediocre mobility and maneuverability, especially when moving on bad roads,” the source pointed out.
Another weak point of Western military equipment, the insider added, is “a very complicated design, something that is related to this hardware’s reparability and maintenance.”
"Maintainability is extremely low, and maintenance is very resource-consuming,” the source said, referring to what they described as “irrational” design of some Western military equipment.
The remarks followed Russian President Vladimir Putin speaking on Thursday about the failure of Ukraine’s alleged second stage of the counteroffensive.
"The enemy was not successful in all directions of firefight. All counteroffensive attempts have been stopped, and the enemy has been pushed back with heavy losses," Putin said on the sidelines of the Russia-Africa summit in St. Petersburg earlier this week.
The US and its NATO allies increased their military supplies to Kiev shortly after Russia launched its special military operation in Ukraine. Moscow has repeatedly warned countries sending weapons to Ukraine that the Kremlin sees these military shipments as legitimate targets. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, for his part, stressed that NATO allies arming and training Ukrainians is tantamount to a direct involvement in the Ukraine conflict.