Late last month, a video posted online by the Syrian opposition showed a modern Russian T-90 tank being hit by a US-made TOW anti-tank missile during a battle on the outskirts of Aleppo city.

American TOW missile shoots Russian T-90 tank

In the video, the T-90 tank did not explode after being hit in the middle of the body by a missile weighing about 7 kg.

Recently, a photo of a tank appeared on Russian military forums with the explanation that this was the T-90 that was hit by the TOW missile in the video.

According to military analyst Robert Beckhusen of WarIsboring, the photo shows that the TOW missile hit the right side of the tank’s turret, causing one of the two Shtora optoelectronic suppression lights below the turret to collapse.

An optoelectronic suppression light in the Shtora system (circled in red) on the T-90 collapsed after being hit by a TOW missile.

Experts at the Russian Steel Research Institute, a company specializing in manufacturing metal pieces that make up the explosive reactive armor for the T-90 tank, were very excited about this photo.

Engineers at this institute believe that without the Kontakt-5 explosive reactive armor, the T-90 would certainly have been drilled by the TOW missile, and the entire fire stream had a temperature of more than 1,000 degrees from the missile.

The fact that a Syrian soldier jumped out of the tank after the rocket’s explosion showed that he was not seriously injured, seemingly only stunned by the pressure of the turret cover being opened, absorbing the shock wave from the explosion.

Engineers determined that the Kontakt-5 explosive reactive armor was activated promptly, pushing the entire fire stream of the TOW missile to the outside, preventing it from piercing the tank’s armor and ejecting inside.

The most serious damage to the tank was the Shtora optical suppression light, a weapon that should have stopped the TOW missile before it hit the tank.

Shtora is an optical jamming system designed to disrupt the guidance signals of anti-tank missiles.

Two optical suppression lights are equipped on the T-90 tank.

The T-90 is one of Russia’s most modern tanks, although the tank shown in the video is an older variant produced in the early 1990s. Russia began sending the T-90 to Syria after the opposition in

The BGM-71 TOW anti-tank missile was born in the 1970s and was widely used by the opposition in the Syrian conflict to eliminate the armor gap with the government army.

TOW missiles destroyed hundreds of tanks, motor vehicles and several helicopters on the ground of the Syrian army.

Syrian rebels used TOW missiles to attack government tanks.

According to Russia’s Military-Industrial Courier magazine, the newly emerged photo partly shows the high survivability of the T-90 tank on the battlefield, where anti-tank weapons are always the obsession of any force.

See more: Mistake caused Russian T-90 tank to be hit by TOW missile in Syria