Originally Posted by
SadPole
Suppose you are a rebel, you know you screwed up and you want to cover up.
- Why not dump the whole thing into a river or a lake, or blow it up and dump it? The damn thing is a tracked vehicle so all you have to worry about is not leaving a complete trail if you don't want it found.
- If you really feel you need to take it back (south) to Russia, then Snizne is only some 20 km from the border with Russia. No good road connects advanced gov positions along Russian border near Anvorosiivka, Sverdlovsk and the boonies you need to cross to get to Russia.
- You have a tracked vehicle, you don't even need a road. 20 minutes and you are in Russia.
Dumping it into a lake presents an obvious problem that eventually Ukrainian army will take the area and fish the thing out of the lake. There aren't any particularly deep lakes or rivers around anyway. The biggest local river is Seversky Donets, with average depth 2.5 m. Blowing it up so thoroughly as to destroy all identifying properties is also problematic (it's a big hunk of steel, after all). The safest way is to get it into Russia and let it disappear on the other side of the border.
Snizhne is 20 km from the border with Russia as the crow flies, but that particular part of the border is under firm Ukrainian control. You are not going to have a solid chance of sneaking it through that way. You have to go through one of the separatist-controlled border crossings. The primary one is Krasnodon/Izvaryne, far to the northeast, that's the one that Russia uses to send most of its heavy military equipment to the rebels. There are multiple Youtube videos showing convoys of tanks and other armored equipment heading through Krasnodon. The preferred route seems to be Krasnodon-Luhansk-Donetsk, for whatever reason. (E.g.
http://ukraineatwar.********.nl/2014...-vehicles.html)
As to why they have to go through Luhansk instead of going straight for the crossing, that is harder to explain, but there may be reasons. Many roads in the area are passable on paper but not in practice, because of blown bridges & such.