MMI UKRAINIAN MILITARY VEHICLES, UKRAINE NATIONAL DAY 2017
AFGHANISTAN
The first armoured vehicle of the Kingdom of Afghanistan was a Lancia IZ armoured car, which the Italian government presented to King Amaullach in 1928 during his visit to Italy. At the same time, four Renault FT light tanks were also transferred to Afghanistan from the USSR. They remained in service until the 1940s, although by that time they were only used during ceremonial parades on the occasion of Independence Day. The wreckage of two of them was discovered in a junkyard near Kabul after the US intervention against Taliban rule. With the approval of the new government, one of them was placed in the Patton Museum of Cavalry and Armor in Fort Knox.
The story of the second Renault FT tank is even more complicated. It was a Polish tank, captured by the Soviets. From late 1919 approximately 120 Polish FTs saw combat against the Soviets. Eight of them were lost in the summer of 1920, some later given to the then-friendly Afghan regime and one of them was found almost a century later. It is not known whether all Afghan Renaults were of the same origin, though. However, one was brought back to Poland and found its new home at the Polish Army Museum in Warsaw in October 2012.
In 1929, the then Minister of War, Nadir Shah, ascended the Afghan throne. During his reign, several years of close cooperation with the Soviet Union ended. Soviet advisers and military technicians had to leave Afghanistan for several decades. Therefore, the deliveries of six twinturret T-26 tanks and a few BA-6 armoured cars, which were arranged earlier, probably did not materialise (many references mention these purchases, however Soviet vehicles are not shown in the later listings of Afghan army equipment nor displayed at the exhibition of armoured equipment in Kabul, despite the preservation of other unique exhibits there).
Afghan Polish FT.
The FT loaded onto a truck.