November 2, 2022. Morning in Kyiv. A charity foundation run by a former comedian opens a crowdfunding page. The target is 200 million hryvnia. The goal is 50 armored vehicles sitting in British warehouses. Within 9 hours, ordinary Ukrainians have donated more than 100 million hryvnia. Within a day and a half, the total reaches 236 million hryvnia.
The number of vehicles purchased climbs from 50 to 60. These were not new machines. They were not gifts from a government. They were second-hand British armored personnel carriers, retired by the British Army, sold off as surplus, sitting in private depots across the United Kingdom. Pensioners, children, small businesses, and Ukrainian diaspora donors had just bought 60 of them in roughly 36 hours.
The vehicle they chose was the FV103 Spartan. A 9.5-ton tracked carrier designed in the 1960s, fielded in 1978, and dismissed by some Western analysts as obsolete the moment it left British service. What followed proved them wrong. Ukraine in the autumn of 2022 faced a problem that Western governments were slow to solve.
Frontline infantry needed protected mobility. They needed something that could move troops through Donbas mud, survive shell fragments and small arms fire, and arrive in numbers. State-to-state deliveries existed, but they were slow, political, and limited. The Ukrainian government had received 35 Spartans donated directly by the United Kingdom in April 2022, but more were needed. Far more.
And there were no more donations coming. What did exist was a surplus market. The British Army had spent more than a decade retiring its combat vehicle reconnaissance tracked family. Spartan replacement had begun in 2009. By 2022, hundreds of vehicles had passed through private dealers in Britain. The vehicles were low mileage.
According to the Guardian, they had each been driven less than 16,000 km. They were sitting in secret warehouses waiting for buyers. The problem was simple. Buying them required money the Ukrainian state could not easily spend on second-hand equipment when it was begging for tanks. That is where Serhiy Prytula came in, a television presenter turned volunteer logistician.
Prytula had already run the famous people’s Bayraktar campaign earlier that year. His foundation knew how to move money fast. On November 2, 2022, they launched the Spartan appeal. The branding was direct, “Grab them all.” Per Ukrayinska Pravda, the foundation ultimately collected more than 235 million hryvnia, roughly 6.5 million United States dollars, in literally a day and a half.
Prytula himself posted on social media on November 3. His words, translated, “No one never ever can defeat our nation because we are the Ukrainians. We have crowdfunded for 60 British Spartan APCs in only 1.5 days. But 60 Spartans was only the headline. The final contract signed across five different British private dealers covered 101 vehicles from the broader combat vehicle reconnaissance tracked family.
40 Spartans, 21 Sultan command vehicles, eight Stormer carriers, and assorted recovery, ambulance, and FV430 variants. The Spartans alone came to 2 million 138,000 pounds, at between 41,000 and 60,000 pounds per vehicle. The volunteer rush had driven the market up. Ukrainian World Congress organizer Andriy Potichny told Ukrayinska Pravda that prices for armored vehicles in Britain had increased 25 to 35% since the summer of 2022.
A Spartan that had cost $35,000 before the war was now selling for $79,000. So, why these vehicles? Why a 1970s tracked design when faster wheeled options existed? The answer lies in the metal. The Spartan is built from 7017 aluminum-zinc alloy. This was not the obvious choice in the 1960s. The American M113, designed in the same era, used 5083 grade aluminum.
Easier to weld, easier to manufacture, cheaper. Alvis, the British designer, rejected it. 7017 is harder, more difficult to work, and more expensive. But, it offered something the American alloy could not. A hull light enough to keep the vehicle under 11 tons combat weight, strong enough to resist 14.
5 mm heavy machine gun fire across the frontal arc at 200 m, and durable enough to last decades. The full armor envelope stops 7.62 mm armor-piercing rounds across the rest of the vehicle. The choice mattered. Ground pressure on a Spartan is close to that of a foot soldier. In Donbas mud, that is the difference between a vehicle that moves and a vehicle that does not.
The Spartan also fits inside a C-130 Hercules transport aircraft. Two Scorpions, the related light tank, fit inside a single Hercules. Russian equivalents could not match this. Maxim Kostetsky, the Protula Foundation’s transport coordinator, explained the choice plainly to the Guardian. His words, “The base is tracked, and due to that fact, it can move around in bad weather conditions because we have rain almost every day right now during the autumn season.
It is going to start snowing soon, and the Spartans will be very good on the front line, especially in Donbas where the heaviest fighting is going on right now.” The full specification, combat weight, 10,670 kg. Crew of three plus four passengers. The original Jaguar J60 4.2 L petrol engine produced roughly 190 horsepower, later upgraded in 1999 to the Cummins BTA 5.9 L diesel at 235 horsepower.
Road speed up to 96 km/h. Range around 510 km. Standard armament is one 7.62 mm L37A1 one machine gun with 2,000 rounds fireable from under armor. The vehicle is amphibious with an erected flotation screen. Production reached 691 Spartans by the end of 1986. Now, before we see how this performed in combat, if you are enjoying this deep dive into British engineering, hit subscribe.
It takes a second, costs nothing, and helps the channel grow. All right, let us get into the combat record. The first batch of 24 Petula funded Spartans arrived in Ukraine on March 1 and 2, 2023. The foundation showed them publicly on March 3. Within weeks, they were on the front line. The first batch went to territorial defense and volunteer units.
Among them, the 251st Territorial Defense Battalion, the 127th Territorial Defense Brigade, the first separate mechanized battalion of the 67th Mechanized Brigade. Ukrainian crews modified them immediately. The original 7.62 mm machine gun was inadequate for the threat environment. Crews bolted an M2 Browning .
50 caliber heavy machine gun and a Mark 19 automatic grenade launcher onto the AV number 16 turret. This added firepower, but forced the gunner to expose himself when firing. So, additional steel plating was welded onto the turret to compensate. The combat record that followed surprised observers. Consider one documented case. A Spartan supplied through the Ukrainian World Congress was struck twice by Russian Zala Loitering Munitions in Donetsk Oblast. Two direct hits.
The Ukrainian soldier filming the aftermath delivered his verdict on camera. His words, “Okay, in short, Spartan is intact. Some parts of the wing hit it, and I cannot say it is damaged. Everything adjacent to the Spartan lies destroyed nearby, but on the Spartan itself, there is no damage. That was not a one-off.
According to the open-source loss tracking project Oryx, which counts only visually confirmed losses with photographic evidence. The Spartan combat record as of January 2025 stood at 17 destroyed, four damaged, and two captured. 23 total visually confirmed losses against well over 100 vehicles delivered across all sources.
That is a survival rate that few armored vehicles in Ukrainian service can match. The Spartan is not invincible. Andriy Petyshny of the Ukrainian World Congress described one of their donated vehicles destroyed by Russian artillery near Bakhmut. His words to Ukrayinska Pravda, “The vehicle came under artillery fire.
It burned out, but the crew survived. It has saved the lives of several defenders.” That phrase, “The crew survived,” recurs in Spartan combat accounts. The vehicle’s job is not to win firefights, it is to deliver infantry alive. Now, the comparison. How does a 1970s British design compare to its Russian and NATO contemporaries on the same battlefield? The Russian equivalent most often encountered is the BTR-80.
13.6 tons, eight-wheeled, steel armor between 7 and 9 mm with up to 14 mm on the turret. Frontal protection rated against 12.7 mm rounds, which is less than the Spartan’s 14.5 mm frontal rating despite the BTR being 3 tons heavier. Armament is stronger with a 14.5 mm KPVT and a coaxial machine gun.
Road speed 80 to 90 km per hour. The improved BTR-82A added a 30-mm auto cannon, spall liners, and improved mine protection. But at 16 tons combat weight and on wheels, it sinks in conditions where the Spartan still moves. The closer Russian comparison is the MTLB. 11.9 tons, tracked, steel armor between 3 and 14 mm.
A 1960s Kharkiv design originally intended as an artillery tractor, pressed into service by both sides as an improvised troop carrier. The MT-LB carries more infantry, 13 total including crew, but its armor stops only rifle fire across most of the vehicle. Its single 7.62-mm machine gun is outclassed by the Spartan’s Ukrainian upgraded armament.
And its steel hull is heavier per unit of protection than the Spartan’s aluminum. The NATO equivalents tell a similar story. The American M113 is the obvious comparison. 11.3 tons, tracked. 5083 aluminum hull rated for The Spartan’s 7017 alloy provides better frontal protection for similar weight. The German TPz Fuchs is wheeled, weighs up to 23 tons combat loaded, and trades cross-country mobility for road speed.
The Stryker, the most modern of the comparisons, weighs over 18 tons, and per Oryx data has suffered 67 M1126 and 9 M1132 destroyed, damaged, or captured as of August 2025. The Spartan’s niche becomes clear. It is not a fighting vehicle. It is a fast, light, well-protected tracked taxi that delivers infantry to where they need to be in terrain that defeats wheels, with crew protection per ton that exceeds every contemporary in its weight class.
There is one popular story worth addressing directly. A widely shared 2026 account describes a vehicle absorbing 52 drone strikes and continuing to function. This story is real, but it refers to a Leopard 1A5 tank crewed by a Ukrainian commander whose call sign is Spartan. It is not the FV103 Spartan APC. The two have been frequently confused in social media coverage.
The actual Spartan combat record does not need that story. The verified record is impressive enough. The strategic impact of the Protura campaign extended beyond the vehicles themselves. Ukrainska Pravda calculated that by spring 2023, Ukrainian volunteer groups had bought 155 armored vehicles in Britain.
The Petro Poroshenko Foundation delivered two more Spartans in December 2022. The Ukrainian World Congress procured 13 Spartans within a broader 57 vehicle package for $2.8 million. The British Army retired its entire combat vehicle reconnaissance tracked fleet by 2023 under the future soldier plan. The Scimitar variant left service in April 2023.
As of May 2023, 114 vehicles awaited disposal, 97 of them Scimitars. These vehicles, judged surplus to British requirements, are still earning their keep on the largest land war in Europe since 1945. The Spartan that British soldiers drove in the Falklands campaign, the same hull design that served in the Gulf War, in Bosnia, in Iraq, and in Afghanistan, is now delivering Ukrainian infantry to assault positions in Donetsk Oblast.
There is something almost embarrassing about this for Western defense establishments. While NATO governments debated for months over each Marder, each Bradley, each Leopard, ordinary Ukrainians used bank transfers to buy 101 British armored vehicles in a day and a half. Vehicles those governments had already declared obsolete.
And those vehicles went to war and saved lives. The 7017 aluminum alloy that Alvis insisted on in the 1960s is still stopping 14.5 mm rounds in 2026. The low ground pressure that mattered in the Falkland Islands still matters in Donbas mud. The air transportability that British paratroopers valued in 1978 still mattered when Ukrainian volunteers needed to move 60 vehicles across Europe in weeks rather than months.
The same engineering choices decades apart solving the same fundamental problems. The Spartan was never glamorous. It was never the headline vehicle of any British campaign. It is not the Challenger. It is not the Warrior. It is the unassuming aluminum box that gets the infantry to the fight and gets them home. 60 of them are doing that job right now, paid for by Ukrainian pensioners and school children and small business owners because they trusted British engineering when their own government’s allies were too slow to deliver. The
pensioners and school children were right. A 1970s design, dismissed by some as obsolete, became one of the most quietly effective armored vehicles of the war in Ukraine. That is what British engineering looks like when nobody’s watching. Built to last, built to work, built to bring crews home alive. 40 years after the first Spartans rolled off the Alvis production line in Coventry, ordinary Ukrainians staked their own money on the same proposition that the British army had bet on in 1978. The aluminum held.
QQ4 Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The friendship began on a live television program in November of 1986 in the 11 seconds after Bob Dylan called Keith Richards music derivative on camera. Keith Richard’s response to that assessment, one sentence said without anger, without performance, with the specific directness of a man who has nothing to prove and knows it made Bob Dylan laugh.
Then made Bob Dylan go quiet. then made Bob Dylan say two words that people who know Bob Dylan say he almost never said to anyone. This is the story of those 11 seconds and the 40 years that followed them. The program was a live music interview special broadcast on an American network on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The format was simple.
Two musicians, a host, an hour of conversation about music and the state of it. The producers had assembled the pairing of Bob Dylan and Keith Richards with the specific calculation of television producers who understand that two people with equally strong and potentially incompatible views about what music is and what it should do will produce better television than two people who agree about everything.
The calculation was correct, though not in the way the producers had anticipated. Bob Dylan was 45 years old in November of 1986. Bob Dylan had released Empire Burlesque the previous year and had been on the road for most of the intervening period as part of the True Confessions tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
Bob Dylan was in November of 1986 in one of the most prolific and restless phases of a career that had consisted almost entirely of prolific and restless phases. A career that had moved through folk, rock, country, gospel, and back again, that had been declared finished at least six times by the music press, and at each time continued with the serene indifference of a river to the opinions of people standing on its banks.
Bob Dylan had been redefining what music could be. Since 1962, Bob Dylan had invented and reinvented himself so many times that reinvention had become his defining characteristic, not in the superficial sense of a performer changing costumes, but in the deeper sense of a musician who had never allowed his work to settle into a form that could be anticipated or categorized from the outside.
Bob Dylan understood influence and originality and the relationship between them better than almost anyone alive in 1986. Bob Dylan had spent 24 years thinking carefully and specifically about where music came from and where music was going and what it meant that those two things were always in constant conversation with each other.
Keith Richards was 42 years old in November of 1986. Keith Richards had been playing guitar professionally since 1962. Keith Richards had built a career on a foundation of American blues and rhythm and blues. A foundation that Keith Richards had studied with the systematic devotion of someone who understood that the tradition he was building on was not incidental to the music he was making, but essential to it.
that you could not understand what Keith Richards did without understanding where Keith Richards had come from and what Keith Richards had been listening to since he was a teenager in Dartford with American Import Records and a secondhand guitar and no teacher except the recordings themselves. Keith Richards had never pretended otherwise. Keith Richards had in fact spent considerable energy across his career making the lineage explicit, naming the artists, citing the recordings, insisting on the acknowledgement of influence that the mainstream music
industry had a long history of suppressing or ignoring or crediting to the wrong people. If anything, Keith Richards was more transparent about his sources than most musicians of his generation. Keith Richards had always said openly that the Rolling Stones came directly from the blues, that Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson and the specific tradition of the Mississippi Delta were not background influences, but foundational ones.
The music Keith Richards made was in direct and sustained conversation with that tradition, something Keith Richards considered not a limitation, but a responsibility and a form of respect. The interview had been running for 8 minutes when the host asked Bob Dylan about the current state of rock and roll.
Bob Dylan answered with the density and the indirection that characterized Bob Dylan’s responses to direct questions, turning the question over, approaching it from an unexpected angle, finding his way to what he actually thought through a series of observations that moved like a river rather than a road. Bob Dylan was not a straightforward interview subject.
Bob Dylan had been asked about rock and roll in hundreds of interviews across 24 years and had developed the habit of treating the question as an invitation to think out loud rather than a request for a prepared position. The producer Gerald Sherman said afterward that in the first 8 minutes of the interview, he had been slightly anxious, not because anything was going wrong, but because nothing was going anywhere in particular yet.
The interview had the feeling of two conversations happening simultaneously. Bob Dylan’s internal one and the external one visible to the cameras. And Gerald Sherman was not certain in those first eight minutes that the two conversations would converge into something. Bob Dylan talked about influence. Bob Dylan talked about originality.
Bob Dylan talked about the difference between music that absorbed a tradition and transformed it and music that absorbed a tradition and reproduced it. And then Bob Dylan made his assessment. And then Bob Dylan said with the precision of a man making a musical assessment rather than a personal judgment that the Rolling Stones work, and Bob Dylan was specific, naming Keith Richards as the guitarist whose approach he was discussing was derivative in a way that Bob Dylan found limiting.
Bob Dylan said it without hostility. Bob Dylan said it as a technical observation about the relationship between source material and the work that came from it. Bob Dylan said that Keith Richards played the blues the way the blues had already been played, rather than using the blues as a starting point for something that had not yet been played.
Keith Richards had been listening to this with the specific attention Keith Richards gave to things being said about music by people who knew music. Keith Richards did not interrupt. Keith Richards did not shift in his chair or display any of the visible signals of a person preparing a defensive response. Keith Richards listened to Bob Dylan’s complete observation all the way to its conclusion without interrupting and without displaying any visible signal of preparing a response.
Then Keith Richards said one sentence. The sentence was not a rebuttal. The sentence did not defend Keith Richards music or argue for its originality or challenge Bob Dylan’s characterization of what the blues meant in the context of rock and roll. The sentence was something else entirely, something that required a specific kind of confidence to say.
The confidence of a person who has spent long enough thinking about the same things as the person they are talking to that they can locate the exact point where their thinking diverges and say something useful about that point rather than simply defending their own position. The sentence acknowledged everything Bob Dylan had said, the assessment, the distinction Bob Dylan was drawing, the specific musical concern underlying the observation, and then turned it 90°.
Keith Richards took Bob Dylan’s own framework, the one Bob Dylan had used to analyze Keith Richards relationship to the blues tradition, and applied it back to Bob Dylan’s work with the same precision Bob Dylan had used to apply it to Keith Richards. Spare aimed. The sentence asked Bob Dylan something about Bob Dylan’s own music, about the relationship between Bob Dylan’s sources and Bob Dylan’s output that Bob Dylan had not been asked on television before.
The sentence did not attack. The sentence illuminated. Bob Dylan laughed. The laugh was not the polite laugh of someone responding to a joke. The laugh was the involuntary laugh of someone who has been genuinely surprised. The specific kind of surprise that a person of exceptional intelligence experiences when someone else’s intelligence exceeds their expectations.
Bob Dylan laughed for 4 seconds. Then Bob Dylan stopped laughing. Then Bob Dylan was quiet for 3 seconds in the way that Bob Dylan was quiet when Bob Dylan was thinking rather than performing thought. Then Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” The producer in the booth, a man named Gerald Sherman, who had been working in television for 14 years, said afterward that in 14 years of live television production, he had never heard Bob Dylan say those two words in a public forum.
Gerald Sherman said he had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions and had observed Bob Dylan in numerous other contexts and that you’re right was not a phrase that Bob Dylan deployed easily or often because Bob Dylan had spent 24 years being right about music in ways that other people eventually caught up with. And the experience of being right ahead of everyone else does not generally produce a man who says you’re right readily when someone else makes a point.
The host of the program, a journalist named Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said afterward that the 11 seconds between Bob Dylan’s assessment and Bob Dylan saying, “You’re right,” were the most extraordinary 11 seconds of television she had been present for. Patricia Wells said that what she witnessed in those 11 seconds was not a debate or a confrontation or a celebrity exchange of competing opinions.
Patricia Wells said what she witnessed was one musician recognizing another musician as an equal, which was in the specific context of Bob Dylan in 1986, not something that happened in public very often. The interview continued for another 42 minutes after those 11 seconds. The conversation between Bob Dylan and Keith Richards in the remaining 42 minutes was described by everyone who watched it as fundamentally different from the first 8 minutes.
The host, Patricia Wells, who had been conducting music interviews for 12 years and understood the difference between the performance of conversation and actual conversation, said that at approximately the 9-minute mark, something shifted in the studio. That the formal interview, architecture dissolved, and what replaced it was something less structured and more genuine.
Bob Dylan and Keith Richards talked about influence and originality and the blues and what it meant to build on a tradition without being consumed by it. They talked about specific recordings and specific musicians with the specificity of two people who had spent their entire adult lives thinking about these things and rarely found another person who had thought about them with equivalent care.
They talked about where music came from and where music was going and whether those two questions were actually one question or two. Patricia Wells said afterward that she had asked approximately four questions in the remaining 42 minutes because Bob Dylan and Keith Richards did not require questions. They required only a room and a camera and the shared understanding that what they were saying together was worth recording carefully.
She said it was the best interview she had ever conducted and that she had conducted the smallest part of it. After the program, Bob Dylan and Keith Richards were in the corridor outside the studio when the host Patricia Wells passed them. Patricia Wells said she did not stop because she did not want to interrupt.
She observed them for approximately 30 seconds from a distance. She said they were talking with the ease of people who had known each other for years rather than people who had met for the first time 2 hours earlier. She said that something had shifted between them during the broadcast that the broadcast had made permanent rather than temporary.
She continued down the corridor and did not look back. She said in her account of that evening that she had decided in that moment not to interrupt the conversation because some conversations are more valuable than any question a journalist might ask and that the conversation she had observed for 30 seconds in the corridor outside the studio was one of them.
She had been a music journalist for 12 years. She recognized the difference. Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have maintained their friendship across four decades. They have appeared together at various events, most significantly at the concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, where people who were present described them as inseparable for most of the evening, occupying the same corner of the backstage area and talking with the concentrated attention of people who only have a limited amount of time together and intend to use it
well. Bob Dylan has spoken about Keith Richards in interviews with the specific thoughtful care that Bob Dylan reserves for musicians whose work Bob Dylan considers genuinely important rather than merely culturally prominent. Keith Richards has spoken about Bob Dylan in similar terms with the specific respect of someone who recognizes in another person a commitment to music that goes deeper than career.
Neither Bob Dylan nor Keith Richards has made a public statement specifically about how the friendship began or about the November 1986 interview. Bob Dylan has not mentioned the 11 seconds. Keith Richards has not mentioned the sentence. The interview exists in the archive. The 11 seconds are there. The laugh is there. The two words are there.
What is also there for anyone who watches the interview from its beginning and pays attention to the shift that happens at the 9-minute mark is the specific moment when two people who thought they were appearing on a television program discovered they were actually talking to each other. What Keith Richards said in that one sentence has never been officially reported.
The people who were in the studio that evening, Gerald Sherman, Patricia Wells, the floor crew, the two camera operators, the makeup artist who was watching from the side of the set, have described the sentence in consistent terms. They have described its effect. They have described Bob Dylan’s laugh and Bob Dylan’s silence and Bob Dylan’s two words.
They have not repeated the sentence itself in the specific understanding that the sentence was said between two musicians on a television program and that its power resided in the specific context of that exchange and would not survive removal from it intact. What can be said is this. Keith Richards said something to Bob Dylan about Bob Dylan’s music that used Bob Dylan’s own observation about Keith Richards as its starting point and arrived somewhere that Bob Dylan had not anticipated.
Keith Richards turned Bob Dylan’s assessment 90° and showed Bob Dylan something about the music they had both spent their lives making that Bob Dylan recognized immediately as true. And Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” Two words said by Bob Dylan in public on live television in 1986 to Keith Richards in response to a single sentence Keith Richards had said about music.
Two words that Gerald Sherman, who had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions, said he had never heard Bob Dylan say in a public forum. Two words that Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said were the most significant two words she had heard in those 12 years. Not because of their content, but because of who said them and what it cost to say them and what it meant that Keith Richards had produced them in 11 seconds from a conversation that began with Bob Dylan calling Keith Richards’s music derivative. And Keith Richards and
Bob Dylan have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The sentence did its work in 11 seconds on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The work has been ongoing ever since. If this story moved you, subscribe and leave a comment below. Have you ever said something to someone that turned a potential disagreement into an unexpected and lasting connection? Tell us about it in the comments below.
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