Russia is sending “museum pieces” into war

 Russia’s Victory Day parade was a more modest spectacle than in previous years, with only one tank on display.

This comes the day after CNN reported on the state of Russia’s military hardware being deployed in Ukraine.

A video, seemingly filmed in late March, showed a cargo train loaded with Soviet tanks being transported somewhere in Russia. “Wow,” a woman said, pointing her phone at the train chugs along. “This is the second train, there was one just like it before.”

Moscow has been known to bring out older military equipment from storage to help it wage war in Ukraine – but these are different.

They’re so old, you can find them in museums.

The tanks are T-55s, a model first commissioned by the Soviet Union’s Red Army in 1948, shortly after the end of World War II. Cheap, reliable, easy to use and easy to maintain, Russia used this model to quash uprisings in former Warsaw Pact countries, rolling through Hungary in 1956, then Prague, capital of what was then Czechoslovakia, in 1968.

Photographs shared by pro-Kremlin bloggers now appear to show these tanks in Russian-occupied territories in Ukraine.

“The Soviets never threw anything away,” historian John Delaney, a senior curator at the Imperial War Museum in Duxford, Cambridge, told CNN. “There’s probably a significant number of them sitting in sheds waiting to be reconfigured.”