Russia says Leopard and Abrams tanks "will burn like the rest" in Ukraine

The Kremlin is not worried that Ukraine now has modern tanks from the United States and Europe.

"They will burn like the rest," Dmitri Peskov, Vladimir Putin's spokesman, said on Wednesday.

Moscow has spoken in the past of "red lines" in the supply of other weapons to kyiv, but the shipment of American M-1 Abrams tanks and German Leopard 2 and other European countries will not lead it to pick up the phone.

When asked if Moscow will hold talks with Berlin about this new chapter in the war, Peskov has been as concise as he is blunt: "They will not take place."

“We repeat: these tanks will burn like all the others.

They are very expensive and all this will fall, first of all, on the shoulders of European taxpayers.

The Americans, as always, will remain on the sidelines and, most likely,

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Putin's spokesman has also taken the opportunity to throw another dart and feed the debate around alleged dissensions within NATO.

“There are a lot of mutually exclusive statements, news stories and leaks.

It is clear that all is not well there.

Not everything is going well within the Atlantic Alliance itself, nor is everything going well due to the presence of tanks [in Ukraine]”, Peskov asserted.

However, as happened with the disconnection of Russian gas or the cap on the price of oil sold by the Kremlin, after the debates the allies have maintained the common front against Moscow's offensive.

The German government demanded coordination from the partners to send the armored vehicles to kyiv, and finally on Tuesday Berlin decided to approve the delivery of its Leopard 2 and authorize the re-export of the armored vehicle from other countries, while Washington considered the delivery of its Abrams to kyiv .

US aid to Ukraine has not stopped growing since Putin launched the offensive.

The State Department has detailed all the military material delivered to Ukraine since February of last year, and the sum reaches 24.6 billion euros in armored vehicles, cannons, ammunition, missiles and other means,

Peskov's words have been joined by the Russian ambassador to the US, Anatoli Antonov, who has also predicted that his military "will destroy US tanks in the same way that they have destroyed all other NATO devices", and has blamed again to Washington of the conflict to be supplied before the material offensive on kyiv, with the delivery of Javelin portable anti-tank rocket launchers while Russia deployed its troops around the borders of Ukraine.

“Arguments about defensive weapons will no longer work.

This is another blatant provocation against the Russian Federation,” Antonov added.

The spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zajárova, has spoken along the same lines, accusing Germany of leading "a pre-planned war against Russia."

Tanks join the headache posed to Moscow by Himars precision shuttles and other weapons.

The Russian Defense Ministry maintains that it has destroyed several of these artillery pieces.

kyiv, however, claims that not a single one of its 20 units has been hit since it received its first more than half a year ago.

Back then, Peskov warned that Washington was approaching its red lines: "[The US] is deliberately pouring gasoline on the fire."

Concern among the military

On the impact of the tanks, the president of the Defense Committee of the Duma, the lower house of the Russian Parliament, has shown himself to be more prudent.

General and deputy Andrei Kartapolov predicted that the new Ukrainian armored formations "will appear somewhere in spring, closer to summer, and then this will be serious."

Kartapolov has given an interview to the state television Rossiya-24 in which he stressed that the most dangerous thing for Russia is that Ukraine does not immediately deploy the tanks on the battlefield, but prepares its units for a few months in Poland and adapts its systems logistics to the new weapons.

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“Leopard tanks are not bad, they are even more effective than Abrams in several aspects.

However, compared to our T-90s, they are significantly inferior in firepower and armor, including reactive protection,” Kartapolov noted.

The other alternative to the Leopards and Abrams would be the new generation armored cars, although they have not yet been seen on the front lines.

According to this leader, if they finally appear "it will be for propaganda reasons" because "possibly only a few dozen have been produced and it is unlikely that commanders trust the combat vehicle."

The Russian media and its pundits have also dismissed the importance of Western tanks by dismissing them as the new "

" (miracle weapons, in German), which always promise an impossible turnaround in the course of war.

“It will not be possible to quickly train the crews of the Ukrainian Armed Forces,” said Alekséi Leonkov, editor of the military magazine

“The training programs in Germany and the United Kingdom require more than one year.

The Poles, who receive Leopard from time to time, retrain every two or three years, and we are talking about professional soldiers.

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