The British company Cook Defence Systems has mastered the production of tracks of Soviet design in order to supply them for Ukrainian armored vehicles.
This was reported by the UK defence journal.
The United Kingdom and the "Fund for Ukraine", through Defence Equipment & Support, have signed contracts with the leading global developer and manufacturer of tracks Cook Defence Systems (CDS) for the supply of track kits to Ukraine.
The contracts involve the supply of kits for 500 units of Ukrainian military equipment. This includes both British machines, including the Challenger 2 tanks, and Soviet-era armored vehicles.
Representatives of Cook Defence Systems told journalists about the difficulties in mastering the production of Soviet-era products.
"We had to reconstruct equipment from Soviet times using limited reference materials and a lot of our own know-how, working with the production processes and materials available to us rather than the original Russian technologies. One of the biggest challenges was doubling our production. We reconfigured production lines and hired new people wherever possible," said CDS Managing Director William Cook.
During the development of tracks compatible with Soviet-era vehicles, the company's engineers had to rely on museum exhibits, reference documents from the Cold War era, and technical experts in armored vehicles.
The specific models of Soviet-era armored vehicles for which the company localized track production are not disclosed. However, it is likely that they are less common types of equipment not present in the global market.
For widely used armored vehicles like the T-72 tank family or BMP-1/2 infantry fighting vehicles, there are many options available on the market as they were mass-produced for export and manufactured by Warsaw Pact countries, China, and India.
The situation is different for spare parts for T-64 and T-80 tanks. During Soviet times, they were not exported abroad, so there are hardly any third countries in the world that could sell spare parts for them.
Most of the components for the aforementioned equipment were sourced by Ukrainian enterprises from limited stocks or removed from decommissioned equipment, which was abundantly available in the storage facilities of armored vehicle plants.
