Sunday 06 March 2022 12:59
Cheap Chinese tires were blamed for preventing a Russian convoy of armored vehicles from reaching Kyiv.
Yesterday the Ministry of Defense released an update revealing that a convoy of Russian tanks advancing on Ukraine’s capital remained 30km from the center of the city after making little progress over the three days previous ones due to “Ukrainian resistance, mechanical breakdowns and congestion”. ”
Karl Muth, a University of Chicago-based scholar and self-proclaimed tire expert, took to Twitter to lay out a theory blaming cheap Chinese tires for the slow progress of Russian vehicles.
“These are not Soviet-era heavy-duty radial tires,” Muth said, commenting on a photo of a Russian army vehicle with torn tires.
Instead, Muth thinks the trucks use “Chinese military tires, and I believe Yellow Sea YS20 specifically.”
“It’s a tire that I encountered for the first time in Somalia and Sudan. it’s a poor Chinese copy of the excellent Michelin XZL military tire,” he continued.
Former Pentagon staffer Trent Telenko also got stuck in the debate and said ‘poor Russian army truck maintenance practices’ created a risk of equipment failure. .
“When you leave military truck tires in one place for months. The sidewalls are rotten/brittle, so using a low tire pressure setting for any appreciable distance will result in catastrophic tire tear failure,” Telenko said.
“There’s a huge operational level involvement in that,” Telenko continued, pointing out that the equipment is too fragile to deal with muddy terrain forcing the Russian convoy to stick to elevated paths.
“Crimea is a desert and the southern coastal areas of Ukraine are drier. So we don’t see that there. But elsewhere the Russians have a huge problem for the next 4-6 weeks,” he concluded.
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