“This is colossal advertising and Russia expects new purchases worth tens of billions of dollars,” Alexander Markov, political analyst and member of Russia’s Council on Foreign and Defense Politics, told Al Jazeera. But Moscow could earn a lot more after the world saw Russia-made weapons, old and new, battle-tested by the Russian air force and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s military on the ground. The Kremlin said it spent almost $500m on its military operation in Syria that started on September 30 and goes on despite a widely advertised partial withdrawal last month.

READ MORE: Did Putin trump Obama in Syria? It was also a perfect commercial for Russian arms producers. The whole episode was “a chance to see what happens when state-of-the-art hardware from two major world powers violently collide in the Middle East”, Robert Beckhusen wrote for the National Interest magazine. The tank was operated by Syrian government forces, and the TOW was launched by Hawks Mountain Brigade, an opposition group that got the TOW via Saudi Arabia or directly from the CIA, a military analyst said. The episode may have pitted weapons produced by Cold-War rivals, but the scene took place in Aleppo in February. The tank withstood a lightning-like explosion without igniting, and one of the crewmembers hastily got out of the turret. A T-90, one of Russia’s most advanced battle tanks, was hit by a US-made “tank killer” – a tube-launched, wire-guided BGM-71 TOW missile.

Tank battles syria