French Defence Giant Creates Animated Video Showing Destruction of Two Russian T-72s With One Shell

Western and Israeli arms manufacturers regularly use 3D animated Russian equipment as targets to show off their defence products, given the popularity of Russian military tech among the non-Western-allied armies of the world.

French defence giant Nexter Systems has released an animated video showing the destruction of Russian equipment via its new CAESAR howitzer artillery.

The footage, which looks like something out of the Wargame: European Escalation series of computer games, and is set to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, shows Nexter Titus reconnaissance vehicles equipped with Nerva robots requesting fire support from CAESAR batteries nearby. The latter are then seeing firing their rounds, destroying two tanks made out to look like Russian T-72B3 main battle tanks with one shot before driving away to avoid retaliatory fire on their positions.

First unveiled in 2015 at a defence expo in the UK, the CAESAR 8x8 battery’s Tatra-based cab seen in the video looks suspiciously similar to the angular design of the Russian Kamaz Typhoon armoured mine-resistant ambush protected (MRAP) vehicle, developed in 2010 and introduced in 2014.

Russian-language users flooded the comments section of Nexter Group’s YouTube page to give their "reviews," joking about the “system requirements of this new game” and quipping that “the second part of the game will see France become a part of the Russian Federation.”

“I thought they were going to start shooting croissants,” one user joked. Others expressed disappointment over the animators’ decision to model Russian tanks, with one asking why the video shows Russian armour being destroyed if Moscow and Paris are “friends.”

Others pointed to the technical inaccuracies of the video, including the footage, at 1:43, showing the shell being fired through a heavily-wooded area. “Artillery firing through the trees – this is really something en Francais. The result would be minced meat surrounding the howitzer after the first shot,” one Russian-language user quipped. “Trees 10 metres in front of the CAESARs…I am not certain about the deployment doctrine here,” a French-language commentator added.

Nexter Systems is not the first defence company to use Russian equipment in 3D demonstrations to show off its new equipment. Earlier this summer, Israeli arms giant Rafael released an animated video showing its new cruise missile destroying a corvette like the ones employed by Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. Before that, Texas-based defence company Bell Textron demonstrated its Bell 360 Invictus helicopters eliminating air defence batteries that look suspiciously like Russia’s S-400s in a 3D animation. Earlier still, the South Korean Air Force released a video showing F-35s pounding Russian-made air defence systems in North Korea of a kind Russia is not even known to have sold to the country.