The priority for the commander is to select a location that cannot easily be seen from the road and also offers a degree of cover from Russian guns. There is no time to seek cover from overhead attack – the crew will just have to hope the Russians don’t have drones in support that could call in artillery or anti-tank missiles.

An indication the Ukrainian crew is racing to take advantage of an opportunity is that the tank stops with the barrel pointing over the side of the vehicle. The majority of the thickest armour on a tank is on the front – the part normally exposed to the enemy – meaning the sides, belly, rear and turret top are relatively unarmoured.

No tank commander would choose to engage the enemy with the vehicle’s side so exposed but there is no time; a number of Russian BTR-82s, an armoured personnel carrier likely to be carrying about 10 troops, have already passed.

The tank fires a round at the armoured column, only about 150m away.

The round misses and explodes in an area of woodland on the far side of the road. The fact there is a blast suggests the T-64 fired a high explosive round, best used against lightly armoured vehicles, rather than a much more dense ‘long rod penetrator’ designed to perforate tank hulls and create an over-pressure inside the turret which will destroy everything in the vehicle.

The rod blasts into the vehicle so fast that two things happen. First, fragments of the skin of the tank and internal fittings are flung around in the powerful wake behind the rod. The “behind armour effect”, to use the military term, is akin to a shotgun blast inside the vehicle. The crew will be decimated.

The second effect of the hydrodynamic regime is an incredible rise in temperature due to the sudden increase in pressure once the rod enters the vehicle. This is likely to cause any armaments inside the tank to explode and is the main reason we have seen so many images of tank turrets being blasted off vehicle hulls.  

After the first miss, the Ukrainian tank crew swings the hull to face the direction of the Russian column in anticipation of a reaction, thereby pointing the area of the vehicle covered in the thickest armour towards the main threat.