MOSCOW, May 20. /TASS/. A German-made Leopard 2 tank can scarcely be regarded as a user-friendly armored vehicle, Sergey Suvorov, retired colonel, Candidate of Military Sciences and armor expert, told TASS on Tuesday.
The military expert pointed to some specifics of the crew’s location in Western-made tanks that can hamper their operation and complicate their exit from a damaged vehicle.
"The mechanic-driver’s seat is the most comfortable place [in Leopard tanks]," said the military expert who had been inside German-made main battle tanks on multiple occasions. "A good seat, pedals and it is more or less spacious. However, there is one nuance: the latest 2A5, 2A6, 2A7+ and 2A8 modifications have extra armor added to their turret, which prevents the mechanic-driver from leaving the tank through his hatch," he pointed out.
"So, it turns out that the three crewmembers - the mechanic-driver, the gunner and the commander - get into the tank one by one through the commander’s hatch. The gunner also has his hatch. That is all about the tank’s ergonomics: they have to leap onto each other there. The commander sits with his legs on the gunner’s shoulders. That is why, there can hardly be any talk about the tank’s convenience," the military expert said.
The crews in American-made tanks operate in similar conditions, he added. The expert pointed out that a mechanic-driver is actually in a prone position during combat, "which is extremely inconvenient."
"They have sought to lower the height of the tank’s silhouette: they have reduced it and a person sitting there cannot operate properly as he is placed in some cramped position. The gunner sits with the commander’s legs on his shoulders and so on," the expert said.
Russia’s state tech corporation Rostec reported earlier that experts had found vulnerabilities in a trophy German-made Leopard 2A6 tank seized from the Ukrainian army. In particular, these vulnerabilities relate to the thickness and structure of its armor and the tank’s internal layout.
After evaluating the real military and technical characteristics of the Leopard 2A6 tank, the experts concluded that it was inferior to Russian-made serial-produced T-72B3M, T-80BVM and T-90M main battle tanks best adapted to modern warfare and upgraded taking into account the experience of the special military operation in Ukraine.