The key thing is the grime, dirt, and rust everywhere in the crew compartment. That's where the tank crew is basically living for weeks on end, and if they can't even keep that clean what is the maintenance quality of the engine like?

I am also ignorant but judging by the picture of an M1 Abrams Interior on Wikipedia https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/M1_Abram...

It looks like the principal difference is the amount of rust on the T-90 and the fact that the thing looks like it hasn't had much attention paid to it.

I imagine this is one of those things that is a question of scale. If you're using the machine, you're only 10% likely to encounter a failure. But at a fleet of 1000, you actually have 100 tanks out of full operation. And in crucial moments, it may be that you're forced to jam the gear shift forward multiple times, or compensate for a misaligned sight or something that leads to overall reduced operational efficiency.

And one can imagine that if these parts are rusted, other critical parts have also encountered poor maintenance.

So overall, the short message is that this tank is in bad condition. The longer message is that this tank is typical of Russian tanks and Russian force preparedness and is therefore an indicator that the invasion they're prosecuting will encounter difficulties.

There's my speculation, and I hope it's concrete enough that someone will correct me about the parts I'm obviously wrong about. Sadly, neither the article nor the linked tweets were obvious about what is shown in detail.

There's a linked tweet to a picture of the inside of the tank, which looks like it's in pretty bad repair. There's rust, dirt on equipment - just evidence in general that basic maintenance is not being done. And, fwiw, the T90A entered service in 2004, so it's maybe a 19 year old tank.

T-90M did a long thread and identified it based on the gun, sight and APS as indeed manufactured in 2004

https://mobile.twitter.com/T_90_M/status/1646486051022680064

In the specific context of this conversation, that's an unfortunately confusing Twitter handle.

In other news: country with 800bn spending for military, has good tanks.