
By James Kinnear
The T-14 “Armata” Main Battle Tank (MBT) made its debut public appearance in May 2015, at a time of renewed tensions between the Russian Federation and the United States and its NATO allies not seen since the 1960s during the Soviet era.
The appearance of the T-14 “Armata” was for Western observers as much a revelation as the IS-3 heavy tank that made a shock appearance at the Allied Victory Parade in Berlin in September 1945. After many years of getting by with the modernization of Soviet era tanks, the T-14 “Armata” is the first genuinely new post-Soviet Russian design.