Chechen Warlords Say They’ll Use Tesla Cybertrucks In Russia’s Invasion Of Ukraine

Tesla Cybertrucks are headed to battle. No, this isn’t a joke. A handful of Chechen troopers are alleged to experience into battle in Ukraine with Cybertrucks. Ramzan Kadyrov, a Chechen warlord and the chief of the area, posted two inexperienced CTs armed with Soviet-era DShK 12.7 x 108 mm heavy machine weapons. They’re meant to additional Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine as they combat alongside Russian forces.

Footage reveals the 2 Cybertrucks driving down a dust street as a part of a four-vehicle platoon. You may see troopers standing within the beds of the 2 vehicles, manning these aforementioned machine weapons and taking pictures down airborne targets, in accordance with Wired. Wired says the warlord captioned the Telegram submit with a glowing overview of the Cybertruck’s advantages on the battlefield, writing “Mobility, convenience, maneuverability: such qualities of an electric vehicle are in great demand here.”

Here’s extra, from Wired:

The new footage got here simply over a month after Kadyrov revealed an preliminary video to Telegram exhibiting off a Cybertruck armed with a Russian Kord 12.7 x 108 mm heavy machine gun. That Cybertruck, Kadyrov claimed in a separate Telegram submit made the day earlier than unveiling the contemporary pair of automobiles, had just lately been disabled “remotely” by Tesla chief Elon Musk, who had beforehand denied gifting the infamous warlord the car within the first place, doubtless as a result of it’s prohibited below US sanctions on Russia.

Kadyrov responded to the motion, saying “This is not manly,” on Telegram, in accordance with Wired.

Putting machine weapons on the again of pickup vehicles isn’t precisely a brand new idea.

It was solely a matter of time earlier than some enterprising combatant someplace slapped a machine gun on a Cybertruck. Both common militaries and irregular forces around the globe have been whipping up “technicals”—or “nonstandard tactical vehicles” improvised from civilian rides—for greater than a century. While the final idea of armored automobiles outfitted with firearms presaged the outbreak of World War I by at the very least a decade, the battle accelerated their manufacturing and fielding—and, in moments of necessity, innovation. In one of many earliest documented manifestations of the technical, French navy lieutenant Maxime François Émile Destremau ready a protection of the strategically vital coaling station within the metropolis of Papeete in Tahiti towards a pair of German cruisers in September 1914 by tearing six 37 mm cannons off the warship below his command and mounting them on six Ford vehicles to repel potential touchdown events, in accordance with the 2004 e-book On Armor. As lengthy as the auto has existed, so has the technical.

The technical as most protection observers realize it, constructed on business flatbed pickup vehicles just like the rugged and dependable Toyota Hilux and Land Cruiser, grew to become a fixture of recent irregular warfare throughout the so-called “Toyota War” of the Nineteen Eighties that noticed militia forces from Chad obtain a decisive victory over the Libyan army because of the superior mobility and maneuverability afforded by their light-weight automobiles. (Chadian forces found that, at an appropriately excessive velocity, technicals may traverse open areas mined with Soviet-era munitions with out danger of setting them off.)

Since then, technicals have develop into a fixture of conflicts just like the US army campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Syrian and Libyan Civil Wars, and now the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And these conflicts continued to immediate a flurry of novel improvements with regards to improvised preventing automobiles. Examples embrace Libyan militants mounting a S-5 rocket pod meant for an plane on the again of a truck and a Land Cruiser outfitted with a Russian-made 14.5 mm ZPU-2 antiaircraft gun that American troopers traded two cans of chewing tobacco for to safe Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul throughout the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021—the latter of which is now in a US army museum. (Does a DShK on a buying cart depend as a technical? That’s up for debate.)

This all begs the query, although: will the Cybertruck really be an excellent car on the battlefield? I’m not so certain, and nobody else actually is both. Here’s what Wired has to say in regards to the state of affairs:

Despite the various points which have plagued the Cybertruck since its launch, the car isn’t essentially the worst possibility. While the Cybertruck at the moment has a most vary of 340 miles (or 500 miles with an additional battery pack)—nicely behind the roughly 570- to 700-mile vary of the Hilux—the previous is definitely faster, able to accelerating as much as 60 mph between 2.6 and three.9 seconds, relying on the mannequin, a noteworthy achievement given the car’s dimension and weight.

In phrases of safeguarding its occupants from exterior threats like small arms fireplace, the Cybertruck’s metal “exoskeleton” provides purportedly superior safety to that of the traditional pickup truck, a function that Tesla has been fast to flaunt on promotional supplies. Finally, the Cybertruck, as an electrical car, is freakishly quiet, providing a component of stealth that the US Defense Department specifically has eyed in recent times in comparison with different fossil-fuel-powered floor automobiles.

Mark Cancian, a retired Marine colonel and a senior advisor on the Center for Strategic and International Studies assume tank, isn’t precisely satisfied the Cybertruck will work on the battlefield. He stated the vehicles are “totally cool and totally useless.” So, he’s half proper, I suppose. Cancian stated they have been cool as a result of they “look like something out of a video game and portray Kadyrov as a sort of futuristic warlord,” however they’re ineffective as a result of they “don’t provide a new capability, except perhaps a bit of stealth.” He’s not incorrect about that. I’d additionally actually wish to know the way charging will work on the battlefield. Cancian stated a fleet of Cybertrucks would “likely be impossible to support.”

Anyway, that’s sufficient out of me. Head over to Wired for a full rundown on how a Cybertruck could honest, together with some ideas from none apart from Jalopnik alum David Tracy.