International

Last batch of T-90S for India by July

By Vladimir Radyuhin

MOSCOW JUNE 27. Russia will ship the third and last batch of 44 T-90S tanks to India in about a month, defence industry sources said here. The tanks will be shipped from the Uralvagonzavod tank factory in Siberia in late July or early August, in keeping with the agreed schedule, the

sources told The Hindu. The first two batches of 40 tanks each were shipped in December and April.

Of the 310 T-90 main battle tanks (MBT) that India has purchased from Russia, 124 will be delivered in fully assembled form. The rest will be produced at the Avadi heavy vehicles factory in Tamil Nadu from semi-knocked-down and fully knocked-down assembly kits supplied from Russia. The T-90S is rated as the best MBT and the only one whose smoothbore gun can fire both regular shells and laser-guided missiles. The attempts by the West to integrate a missile system with the tank gun have failed, and neither the French Le Clerke, nor the German Leopard or the U.S. Abrahams have a missile-firing capability.

However, so far the T-90S tanks have been shipped to India without the missile systems, the Russian sources said. In the pre-shipment firing tests carried out last year, the missile system showed lower than standard accuracy. This could be due to the fact that the Reflex missile system was originally designed for the T-80 tank and needs extra adjustment to work with the T-90. Manufacturers hope to fix the problem by the end of summer, so that all the T-90S tanks for India can be equipped with missiles by the end of the year.

The T-90S will be a star attraction at the UralArmsExpo defence show at Nizhny Tagil early next month, where Russia's latest MBT is expected to demonstrate its missile-firing capability. The INVAR missile, automatically loaded into the 25 mm tank gun, can hit both ground targets and low-flying helicopters up to 5 km.

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