Light Speed Training ‘From the Realm of Fantasy’
“It’s supposed to be eight months of training, but they want to do it in 12 weeks – three months. This is something out of the realm of fantasy,” Viktor Litovkin, a retired Russian Army colonel and veteran military observer specializing in tanks, told Sputnik, when asked just how realistic it is to train an Abrams tanker in such a short time frame.
“A good tankman knows his machine from top to bottom, he has to know it through and through,” the observer said. “How long has it been since you’ve seen a Ukrainian tank driver who knows engineering and military terminology-specialized English? I can’t imagine that there are many such people in the ranks of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Translation is not just a matter of inconvenience, but of perception – everything inside the tanks is in English, including instructions and manuals. So the language barrier is quite significant.”