Something Shockingly BRUTAL Is Happening To Russia's T-90s Near Pokrovsk

Added: 2026-05-08

[00:00:00]March 31st, 2026. A Ukrainian armored column is pushing through mud and smoke toward Russian lines near a town called Hishine. The column has Bradley fighting vehicles, infantry carriers, electronic warfare trucks, and leading it, a 68tonon American tank that Russia had already declared dead. In the next 4 minutes of that assault, something happened that the Russian Ministry of Defense has still not officially acknowledged. We have the footage. We have the Osent. And by the end of this video, you'll understand exactly why this matters and why every defense ministry on Earth is quietly losing sleep over what it proved. Before we get to Pocrs, and we will get there, you need to understand what the M1A1 Abrams actually is because a lot of people get this wrong. This is not some experimental prototype. The Abrams has been America's main battle tank since 1980. It is the tank that rolled through the Iraqi desert in 1991 and barely got scratched. It weighs about as much as 10 family cars stacked on top of each other. It runs on a jet turbine engine.

[00:01:08]Yes, a jet engine, which means it sounds like an airplane decided to become a tank. And honestly, respect. Ukraine got the A1 variant, not the newest, and the internet had a full meltdown about it, as the internet does. The A1 is still a machine that makes Russian tank crews deeply unhappy. The Russian army has a nickname for the Abrams. I won't repeat it here because this is a familyfriendly channel, but it roughly translates to the thing we'd rather not see. Make of that what you will. The problem was never the tank. The problem was the environment. And that's exactly what the spring 2026 fighting proved in the most dramatic way possible. But if you saw an Abrams on the road to Picros today, you might not even recognize it. The sleek sand colored silhouette from the posters gone. In its place is what soldiers are calling the Franken Abrams. Ukrainian workshops were welding Soviet contact one explosive armor bricks directly onto the American hulls. Anti- drone cages bolted over the turret. Electronic warfare jammers zip tied to the hull like a university science project. To a Pentagon engineer, it's a nightmare. To a Ukrainian crewman in the 47th Brigade, it's the only reason he's still alive.

[00:02:24]It's ugly. It's heavy. And it is the only way a 20th century legend survives a 21st century kill zone. Before we talk about what the Abrams did at Pocross, you need to understand what it was up against. Because this isn't just a tank story. It's a story about how warfare itself broke. Here's the problem. An FPV drone, the kind that killed more armored vehicles in Ukraine than any anti-tank missile, costs somewhere between $300 and $800. You can buy the components on the internet. A teenager with decent hand eye coordination can fly one, and it carries enough explosive to go straight through the top armor of almost any tank on Earth, including the Abrams, because the top armor is always the thinnest part. Think about that for a second. a machine that costs $60 million versus a drone that costs less than a weekend in Benadorm. And Russia figured this out in 2023. By 2024, they were running industrial scale FPV drone production, thousands per month. By 2025, they had AI assisted guidance systems that could track a moving vehicle, even through jamming. By early 2026, the front line around Pocross was essentially a no man's land of constant drone coverage. day and night. Every vehicle that moved was watched. Every tank that exposed itself for more than a few minutes was targeted. This is why Ukrainian commanders kept the Abrams back. Not because they were cowards, not because the tank was bad, because putting a $60 million tank into a kill zone covered wallto-wall by $800 drones is just arithmetic. And the arithmetic was brutal. Ukraine's tank crew started calling the front line the fishbowl because everything that moved in it was visible and everything visible was hunted. So what changed on March 31st?

[00:04:14]The answer is Ukraine stopped waiting and built a system to fight through it anyway. And that decision, that single operational choice is what produced the footage we're about to look at. Of changed hands multiple times. By early 2026, the Berdichi area nearby had been shelled so consistently that Ukrainian troops called it the gray zone. Not because of fog, but because nothing green grew there anymore. Russian drone footage and Osent reporting document, at least one confirmed Abrams destroyed in what appears to have been a direct engagement. The Russian Telegram channels went absolutely wild. Every account from Moscow to Vladivvastto was sharing this clip like it was a personal achievement. And here's where I need to be straight with you because this channel doesn't do propaganda. The tank was hit. The Abrams is not invincible.

[00:05:05]Nobody seriously claimed it was except the people who then acted surprised when it wasn't. The Russian narrative was clean and simple. NATO equipment is a fraud. It was also, as usual, missing about half the story. What the telegram channels didn't tell you is the context of that engagement. The Berdichi area in early March was not a controlled tank duel on an open range. It was a chaotic drone saturated attritional nightmare where both sides were losing equipment constantly. The Abrams that was hit was likely isolated, separated from its supporting infantry and electronic warfare assets. That is not the Abrams failing. That is what happens to any tank, Russian or Western, when it loses its support network and gets exposed. A T90 in the same situation dies just as fast. Faster actually, because its fire control system isn't as good, and it can't engage the threat before the threat reaches it. Losing one tank is not a verdict. It's a data point. And data points need context. And the context that matters is what happened three weeks later, 20 kilometers to the west. Let's talk about what the M1A1 actually brings to a fight, because this matters for what we're about to see. The Abrams fires a 120 mm smooth boore cannon. The T90 runs a 125 mm. On paper, close contest. In practice, the Abrams wins the accuracy duel at medium to long range almost every time. the thermal imaging, the laser rangefinder, the ballistic computer. This fire control system was genuinely revolutionary when it was introduced, and it is still exceptional. Ukrainian crews who trained on the Abrams in Germany described the jump from Soviet era equipment as, and I'm paraphrasing here, like going from a Nokia 3310 to an iPhone. Everything works, everything responds, and suddenly you can actually see what you're shooting at. The T90 has contact 5 explosive reactive armor. The T90M, the most modern version Russia has been fielding, carries the improved rele system. This is serious protection and we should not dismiss it. But here is the thing about erra. It is a oneshot solution. Detonate it with one hit and the tank underneath is now much more vulnerable to the next round. The Abrams armor doesn't self-destruct to do its job. Take a hit. You're still in the fight. take a hit in a T90 with erra, the protection is gone. The tank underneath is now exposed. So in a straight duel on flat ground at the ranges both systems were designed to fight at. The Abrams wins more often than it loses. Ukrainian commanders knew this. The problem again was not the duel. It was everything around the duel.

[00:07:54]The drones watching from above, the artillery ranging on anything that stopped moving, the glide bombs that Russia started using in 2024 that can hit a stationary vehicle from 20 km away. The Abrams is a better tank. It was fighting in a worse environment than it was designed for, and Ukrainian commanders had to find a way to use one without losing the other. March 31st was their answer. March 31st, 2026 near Haishin in the Pocrsk direction, the conflict intelligence team, one of the most credible Osent operations tracking this war, reports a Ukrainian mechanized assault, a full combined arms push. And in the footage from that column rolling forward in the mud and smoke of a Ukrainian spring morning, there it is.

[00:08:41]an M1A1 Abrams, not sitting in a treeine, not hullled down behind a burm, waiting for something to shoot at, moving, leading, and within the first 2 minutes of that push, the column ran directly into a Russian armored reaction force, T90s, multiple vehicles moving to intercept.

[00:09:00]This was not a defensive ambush. This was a meeting engagement. Two armored forces running into each other in the smoke and mud. Neither with perfect information. Both with everything to lose. The Abrams opened fire first at range before the T90s had a firing solution. That fire control system we talked about, that's where it matters.

[00:09:22]Not on a spec sheet. In that moment, when the Russian crews were still acquiring the target, the Abrams round was already in the air. That is the caught offguard moment that every Russian telegram channel refused to show you. A Ukrainian combined arms assault in 2026 doesn't look like a World War II tank charge. It is a carefully sequenced drone operation. You have electronic warfare vehicles pushing forward to jam FPV frequencies in a corridor. You have infantry clearing obstacles and watching the flanks. You have artillery suppressing Russian drone launch points before the armor moves. And then once that corridor is open, you push the tanks through fast before the jamming window closes and the drones come back.

[00:10:05]That is what happened at Prosk on March 31st. The Abrams didn't win that fight alone. It won it because Ukrainian forces built a system designed specifically to get it through the kill zone alive and then let it do what it does best on the other side. And what does it do best? Direct fire on fortified positions at range. Russian defensive lines use hardened bunkers, concrete reinforced firing positions, and layered obstacles. And Abram's round through a fortified position at 800 m does not leave much of a fortified position. Russian infantry behind those positions know this. That psychological weight, knowing that thing is coming and that your position might not stop what it's firing, is real. It affects how defenders fight. It affects whether they hold or break. Now, picture this. You're a Russian drone operator in the treeine east of Harishine. Your Telegram feed told you the Abrams was pulled back weeks ago, destroyed, gone. A museum piece. And then your feed shows 68 tons of American tank rolling through the smoke toward your position. That is not a good morning. Aftermath footage confirmed by Osent shows disabled vehicles being finished off by drones after the battle. War is not clean.

[00:11:20]Ukraine took losses in this assault. The Abrams was not untouchable, but it was in the fight, doing exactly what it was designed to do, suppressing positions, holding fire, letting infantry move.

[00:11:31]They didn't send the Abrams to Picross to survive. They sent it to make the other side afraid. And for 31 minutes on a frozen March morning, it worked.

[00:11:40]Here's the part where I have to say something that some of you won't like.

[00:11:44]Late April 2026, reporting indicates Ukraine withdrew its remaining Abrams from frontline positions. And before you go to the comments to declare that this proves the tank is useless, stop.

[00:11:56]Because that is exactly the wrong conclusion. The withdrawal wasn't because the Abrams failed at Picovsk. It was because Ukraine ran the numbers. You have a finite number of these tanks. You have no production line to replace them.

[00:12:09]and Russian drone and precision strike campaigns had evolved to the point where any large high-value platform any platform was facing unsustainable attrition on the front line. This is not an Abrams problem. The T90 faces the same issue. Russia has lost hundreds of T90s in this war. The Leopard 2 faces the same issue. The Challenger 2 faces the same issue. Every modern main battle tank is being eaten by the same threat.

[00:12:37]cheap, mass-roduced, increasingly autonomous drones guided by operators who can sit 20 kilometers from the front and never once be in danger. The most dangerous thing on the Ukrainian front in 2026, weighs 2 kg and was probably assembled in a shed. If that sentence doesn't disturb you, you're not paying attention. So, what does the Abrams record in Ukraine actually mean? It means a tank is only as good as the system around it. Pocrovsk worked because the system worked. Avdivka cost a tank because the system broke down.

[00:13:12]The lesson is not the Abrams is bad. The lesson is that the era of the tank as a standalone decisive weapon is over. And that lesson applies to every army on Earth, not just Ukraine's. The Abrams is not the problem. It is not the solution.

[00:13:27]It is a tool. and in the right hands with the right support on the right morning near Pacross. It was still one of the most effective tools on that battlefield. So here's the question that every defense ministry on Earth is quietly panicking about right now. Can the tank survive? Active protection systems like Trophy, already fitted to some Abrams variants, can intercept incoming ATGMs and rocket propelled grenades, but they were not designed for the swarm of small, fast FPV drones. now saturating the battlefield. The signature is too small, the cost is too low, and there are simply too many of them. The next generation of solutions involves directed energy. Lasers that can burn a drone out of the sky in under a second. The US, Israel, and the UK are all working on vehicle-mounted systems.

[00:14:17]Some are already in field trials, but they are heavy. They consume enormous amounts of power, and they are not yet ready to be bolted onto an Abrams and sent to Pocropovsk. There is also the question of AI. Russia's drone improvements between 2023 and 2026 were partly driven by machine learning.

[00:14:34]Drones that can track and follow a vehicle even when the signal is jammed using visual recognition alone. That is not science fiction. That is what Ukrainian crews were facing in March 2026. The answer is probably not to abandon the tank. It's to reinvent what the tank is part of. A combined arms team built around the drone age with dedicated electronic warfare, counter drone systems, AI assisted threat detection, and human crews who understand the tempo of drone warfare rather than the tempo of cold war maneuver. That is the direction serious military planners are moving. My take, the tank isn't dead, but the tank that wins the next war looks nothing like the one that fought the last one. The Abrams at Picroavsk wasn't a relic, proving it still works. It was the last generation of one idea and the first hint of something completely new. That's where we are. March 2026, one battle, one tank, and a question about the future of warfare that nobody has answered yet.

[00:15:35]That's the Abram story. Spring 2026, not the propaganda version, not the hype version. The version where we actually checked the footage, gave you the context, and didn't let either side off the hook. If this is the kind of breakdown you want more of, subscribe, hit the bell, and tell me in the comments which tank or which battle you want next, because I have opinions about the T90M that are going to upset absolutely everyone equally. I'll see you in the next one.