It took 30 years for T-72 to finally get its revenge.

During the 1991 Gulf War, the Soviet made T-72 tanks suffered a severe reputation loss, when thousands of Iraqi T-72M (the export, stripped down version of T-72A) laid burning in the desert. Even though only a fraction of them were actually knocked out by M1A1 Abrams, and most of the losses were due to US air superiority, a well organized propaganda campaign was run to depict Soviet military equipments as so overhyped that they turned out to be complete trash.

It was a total propaganda victory for the American military industrial complex. In fact, the reputation of the T-72 was so bad that Russia had to rename its successor “T-72BU” (Project 188) to “T-90” to avoid the association. (T-90 is still one of the best performing tanks that have since taken on the British Challenger and German Leopards in the Ukraine War).

It would be more than 30 years before the T-72s would face the M1 Abrams on the battlefield once more, and this time - we finally have a good picture (literal photographs) of how the M1 Abrams fared against the T-72s without air support. History has finally vindicated the Soviet design - still one of the best designed tanks to exist today despite its age.