Russian Tank Troops

The Russian Tank Troops is the armored warfare branch of the Russian Ground Forces. They are mainly used in conjunction with the motorized rifle troops in the main areas and perform the following tasks:

• in defence – on direct support of the motorized rifle troops in repelling the enemy's offensive and application of counter-attacks and counter-strikes;
• in offence – on delivering powerful cleave strikes deeply, developing success, defeating the enemy in meeting engagements and battles.

The Tank Troops are made up of tank divisions, tank brigades, tank regiments and tank battalions of motorized rifle and tank brigades which are highly resistant to the damaging effects of nuclear weapons, have high firepower, high mobility and manoeuvrability. They are able to make full use of the results of nuclear fires - nuclear destruction of the enemy - and, ideally, can quickly achieve the ultimate military goals of any combat or operation.

The combat capabilities of tank formations and subunits enable them to lead active combat operations, day and night, in significant isolation from other troops, to smash the enemy in meeting engagements and battles, on the move to overcome the extensive areas of contamination, to force water barriers, as well as to quickly build a solid defence and successfully resist the attack of superior forces of the enemy.

Further development and increase of the combat capabilities of the Tank Troops are carried out mainly at the expense of its framing with more advanced types of tanks, in which there is the optimal combination of such vital military properties as high firepower, manoeuvrability and reliable protection. In improving the organizational forms the main efforts are focused on giving them the combined-arms nature, what to the utmost suits the content of modern operations (combat actions).

Their service anniversary, Day of Tankmen, is marked annually every second Sunday of September. The official motto of the Russian tank troops is "The Armor is Hard and Our Tanks Are Fast!" («Броня крепка и танки наши быстры») by the first stanza of the March of the Soviet Tankmen from the 1939 Soviet film Tractor Drivers.

Brief history

Russia's first every armoured unit, the 1st Machine Gun Automobile Regiment of the Imperial Russian Army, was raised on 19 August 1914 on the basis of a training mobile company. It was already on the first weeks since the First World War began, and Russia's first armoured vehicles were a number of Russian-produced Russo-Balt armoured cars with British engines from the Austin Motor Company, the first ever to be produced in the country and the first also to see combat, marking the beginning of an era of armoured warfare in Russian lands.

By 1917 and the aftermath of the February Revolution came yet another, the Austin-Putilov armored car, also produced with British support, which saw action in the war and in the events following the October Revolution. These two cars, by the time the Russian Civil War began in 1918, would form the Red Army's first ever armored components - a number of armored companies and battalions. Joined by captured Mark V tanks and a number of armored vehicles of both local and Western manufacture and trucks fitted with cannons and machine guns the small armored park grew on to form part of the growing force, with a seventeen Renault FT tanks - called the "Russian Reno", all remanufactured by the Krasnoye Sormovo Factory No. 112 in Nizhny Novgorod with a locally produced derivative, the "Freedom Fighter Lenin", the first true tank ever to be made - becoming thus the pioneer locally produced armoured vehicles produced by the young Russian military industry. Their appearances in all national parades in Red Square in Moscow beginning in 1921, alongside a number of foreign armoured vehicles made under license to assist the young army, showed the Soviet government's priorities on making armoured warfare part of the national strategy for the Soviet Armed Forces as a whole in its modernization and expansion to keep up with the times.

The formation of the Tank Bureau under the People's Commisariat of Defence in 1924, with the existence of a armoured car battalion under the Technical Directorate of the WPRA (today the Main Agency of Automobiles and Tanks of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation) marked the formation of the modern day Tank Troops, which would materialize in the raising in the summer of 1929 within the Moscow Military District of the first ever Soviet mechanized regiment, the Joint Mechanized Regiment. With its T-18 tanks, the first to be designed by Russians, among its inventory of equipment, the regiment's tank battalion was but the first of many to be raised in the coming years.

Organization

At the time of the Fall of the Soviet Union there were five tank divisions stationed on the territory of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic: the 1st Tank Division (Kaliningrad), the 4th Guards Tank Division; the 5th Guards Tank Division; the 21st Guards Tank Division; and the 40th Guards Tank Division (Sovetsk). In September 1993 the 1st Tank Division became the 2nd Tank Brigade; then a weapons and equipment storage base in 1998; and then, finally, was disbanded in 2008.

In the twenty-first century, a tank brigade is the second largest, after the tank division, of the formations of the Russian Tank Troops. According to the shtat (Table of Organization and Equipment), on average, there are about two to three thousand personnel in a tank brigade. In the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation the specified tank brigade commander's rank is colonel (major general being the minimum for a division). There are also a number of MBT battalions in the motorized rifle brigades and independent battalions.

Today the formations of the Tank Troops include:

Divisional and corps regiments

• 11th Tank Regiment of the 11th Army Corps/Ground and Coastal Defence Forces of the Baltic Fleet (Gusev, Kaliningrad Oblast) - established by January 2019.
• 12th Guards Tank Regiment of the 4th GTD (Naro-Fominsk)
• 13th Guards Tank Regiment of the 4th GTD, (Naro-Fominsk)
• 68th Guards Tank Regiment of the 150th Motor Rifle Division, (Persianovsky)
• 237th Tank Regiment of the 3rd Motor Rifle Division (Valuyki)
• 239th Guards Tank Regiment of the 90th Guards Tank Division (Chebarkul)
• 6th Guards Tank Regiment of the 90th GTD (Chebarkul)
• 80th Tank Regiment of the 90th GTD (Chebarkul)
• 163rd Guards Tank Regiment of the 150th MRD (Persianovsky)
• 228th Tank Regiment of the 144th Guards Motor Rifle Division (Yelnya, Yelninsky District, Smolensk Oblast)

Brigades

• 1st Guards Tank Brigade of the 20th Guards Army, (Boguchar)
• 5th Separate Guards Tank Brigade of the 36th Army (Ulan-Ude)
• 6th Tank Brigade of the 1st Guards Tank Army (Mulino)

References

 This article incorporates text by Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation available under the CC BY 4.0 license.