Watch: First US Abrams tank destroyed in Ukraine, as Putin restructures armed forces

The Russian military has knocked out one of the US-supplied tanks serving with Kiev’s army, footage circulating online suggests.

Moscow’s troops have destroyed the first US-made M1 Abrams main battle tank supplied to Kiev’s forces amid the Ukraine conflict, multiple Russian Telegram channels reported on Monday.

Footage circulating online purports to show the vehicle with a large column of fire rising from its turret. It was reportedly targeted by a FPV suicide drone and sustained at least one hit from a shoulder-mounted anti-tank grenade launcher.

The tank was reportedly hit near the village of Berdychi, located to the northwest of Avdeevka, a key Donbass town recently liberated by Russian forces.

A close-up of the destroyed Abrams taken by a surveillance drone shows the vehicle’s ammunition compartment burned-out, with the engine compartment on fire.

Washington pledged to supply Ukraine with 31 M1 Abrams tanks in January 2022, ahead of Kiev’s long-hyped yet ultimately botched counteroffensive. However, they were fully delivered only by mid-October and have seemingly been kept away from the frontline, being featured only in propaganda videos.

The Ukrainian Abrams have seen actual combat only over the past few days, ending up deployed to the battlefield to bolster Kiev’s effort to stop the westward advance of Russian troops following the fall of Avdeevka, formerly a major Ukrainian stronghold in Donbass and one of the key staging points for indiscriminate artillery and rocket attacks on the city of Donetsk.

Putin restructures Russian armed forces

The Moscow and Leningrad military districts have been re-established to meet the new challenges the country is facing.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday signed a decree reorganizing the structure of the country’s military. The decree re-establishes the long defunct Moscow and Leningrad military districts, as well as incorporating Russia’s four formerly Ukrainian regions into the Southern Military District.

The decree abolishes the Western Military District and the Joint Strategic Command ‘Northern Fleet’, colloquially referred to as the Northern military district or Arctic troops. The Western Military District, headquartered in St. Petersburg, was established back in 2010 during a merger of the Moscow and Leningrad districts, with the Arctic troops becoming a separate entity in 2014.

Apart from taking the military structure of Russia’s west and northwest back to its roots, the order also incorporates the four formerly Ukrainian regions into the Southern Military District. Those regions, namely Zaporozhye, Kherson, and the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, joined Russia in late 2022 following referendums in which the idea was overwhelmingly backed by locals.

The need to re-establish the Moscow and Leningrad districts was first expressed by Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu in December 2022. At the time, he argued the move was needed to counter new challenges the country was facing, namely the expansion of NATO to include Finland and Sweden.

The creation of a new “corresponding troops grouping in the northwest of Russia” was described by the minister as an appropriate response to the augmentation of the US-led bloc.