February 25th, 2022. A bridge over the Urpin River northwest of Kiev. 80 Russian special police officers from Karovo Oblast are moving at speed. Three Kamaz 6×6 trucks. A Soviet era Gaz 66. A BTR armored personnel carrier and one Gaz Tiger armored car. They have been told this will be a parade. They have been told Ukraine will collapse overnight.
One officer would later tell his Ukrainian captives that he was not entirely certain he was even inside Ukraine until the night before. They are moving as if the war is already over. It is not over. Ukrainian forces have them surrounded. Anti-tank missiles and mortar rounds crash into the column on the bridge approach.
The convoy strung out and exposed has no answer. When the firing stops, 77 of the 80 men are dead. Three survive. The GAZ Tiger, Russia’s answer to the American Humvey, its flagship light armored vehicle, is burning on a frozen road outside Kiev. It has been in service less than 20 years. It will be destroyed, abandoned, or captured hundreds of times more before 2024 is over.
Its designation was the GAZ2330, and it was the most captured military vehicle on the modern battlefield. To understand why the Tiger failed so comprehensively in Ukraine, you need to understand the problem Russia faced in the late 1990s. The second Chetchin war began in 1999, and it was brutal. Russian Oman and so special police units, the same kind of units that would die on the urban bridge 23 years later, found themselves fighting block byblock in Grony with UAZ 4×4 jeeps and canvas topped trucks that offered nothing in the way of protection. The Soviet era
BRDM2 scout car was armored but slow, complex, and too large for narrow urban streets. The heavy BTR80 was a full armored personnel carrier, expensive and crew intensive. Russia had nothing in between. Nothing fast, nothing light, nothing armored enough for a checkpoint patrol, but agile enough to chase a pickup truck through a mountain village.
America had solved this problem in 1984 with the HMMWV, the high mobility multi-purpose wheeled vehicle, the Humvey. Russia watched American forces roll those vehicles across Iraq, across Somalia, across Kosovo, and made a decision. Russia would build its own. The irony is that it was not Russia’s idea.
In the late 1990s, the United Arab Emirates approached the Gorki automobile plant through their Bing Jaba Group with a contract worth roughly $60 million. They wanted a desert patrol vehicle in the Humvey mold, a fast modular 4×4 with an open turret ring and enough armor to stop rifle fire. Gaz built three prototypes and unveiled them at the defense exhibition IDX 2001 in Abu Dhabi.
The vehicles looked exactly right, aggressive, squared off with a high roof line and a prominent turret hatch. The UAE ultimately took their money and went to Jordan, developing what became the Nimra vehicle. GAZ kept the design. They offered it to Moscow. Moscow bought it. The Russian army officially adopted the GAZ 2975 in late 2006.
Serial production began at the Arma’s machine building plant in 2007. Within 3 years, it was rolling through Victory Day parades on Red Square. Within 5 years, it was the symbol of Russian military modernization. Within 10, it was in Syria. The vehicle itself was an impressive piece of practical engineering designed for the demands of the Russian military environment rather than a western export market.
The Gaz Tigga M, the primary military variant, weighed 5,300 kg and measured 5.7 m in length. The power plant was a Yamz 534 diesel engine rated at 215 horsepower. Purpose selected to function at temperatures as low as -50° C, a requirement no American Humvey had ever needed to meet. Range was approximately 1,000 km on a full tank.
Ground clearance was 400 mm, meaning it could fordge streams 1.3 m deep and cross ground that would defeat a civilian 4×4 without difficulty. Automatic central tire inflation allowed the crew to adjust tire pressure without stopping. Armament was carried on a pintal mounted roof ring that could accept a 7.62 mm PKP machine gun, a 12.
7 millm cord heavy machine gun, or a 30 mm AGS 17 automatic grenade launcher. Later variants introduced the Arbblelet DM remote weapon station, a fully enclosed turret system with television and thermal optics and laser range finding capable of engaging targets at 2,500 m. operated entirely from inside the vehicle. The Tiger M seated two crew and seven dismounts.
Its cabin was fully enclosed with armored glass rated against small arms fire. A military vehicle that could sprint at 140 km/h, carry a full squad, mount a heavy machine gun, and operate in conditions that would kill a Western engine. On paper, it was formidable. The problem was what the paper did not say. The armor on the Tiger M was 5 mm of heat treated welded steel.
That is the thickness of a standard metal door. It meets NATO stand 4569 level two, meaning it will stop 7.62 mm ball ammunition at close range and deflect artillery shell fragments. It will not stop 7.62 mm armor-piercing rifle ammunition. It will not stop a 12.7 mm DSHK round. It will not stop an RPG7. And its mine protection, rated for approximately 0.
6 6 kg of TNT equivalent beneath the hull is not in the same category as any purpose-built mine resistant vehicle in any Western inventory. The Tiger was not designed to survive a peer war. It was designed to outrun a low inensity insurgency. Russia chose speed and mass production over protection. They chose cost over survivability.
A Tiger M cost the Russian government roughly 1/3 the price of an equivalent Western protected mobility vehicle. Russia could buy hundreds of them. The philosophy was coherent for the wars Russia expected to fight. Chchna, Georgia, Central Asian stability operations, checkpoint duties in occupied territories. It was not coherent for Ukraine.
Now, before we get into where the Tiger met the war, it was never designed to fight. If you are finding value in this kind of deep analysis of modern military hardware, hit subscribe. It costs nothing. It takes 1 second and it helps the channel continue producing this kind of content. The Tiger first appeared in a genuine combat role during the seizure of Crimea in February 2014.
Vehicles from the 22nd Guard Spettznaz brigade appeared on the streets of Sevastapole alongside the so-called little green men. The unmarked Russian special forces whose presence Moscow initially denied. The Tigra looked lethal. It looked like Russia had arrived. In the absence of any real resistance, it performed exactly as advertised. Syria followed.
From 2015 onward, Russian military police deployed to Syria with Tigers as their primary vehicle. The Chetchin and English battalions that patrolled the M4 highway, escorted humanitarian convoys, and provided security around May air base relied on the Tiger almost exclusively. Russian state media broadcast footage of these patrols constantly.
The Tiger was used to project a specific image, modern, capable, controlled. The vehicles were clean and freshly painted. The soldiers in them looked confident. What state television did not broadcast was the IED that detonated beneath a Russian military police tiger near the town of Ain al-A in northern Syria in June 2020. The vehicle was significantly damaged.
Russian sources denied casualties, nor did it broadcast the Syrian Arab army ti captured intact by rebel forces during the fall of the Assad regime in late 2024. The vehicle that Russia had supplied for a decade as a symbol of Damascus’s military legitimacy was now displayed as a trophy by the forces that ended that regime. These were warnings.
They were not heeded. February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine with a force doctrine built on the assumption of rapid collapse. Tigers led reconnaissance columns. Tigers transported Rosvadia special police who expected to secure Ukrainian police stations within hours. Tigers raced ahead of armored columns on roads they had been told would be undefended.
They were wrong on every count. The Urin Bridge ambush was the first catastrophic demonstration of what happens when a lightly armored vehicle meets a prepared defense. It was not the last. In the Zapia region in May 2022, Ukrainian forces destroyed a Russian convoy, including two Tigers using artillery and anti-tank missiles.
In the Kharkiv region, Ukrainian border guard drone units of the Phoenix Battalion began systematically hunting tigers with firstperson view drones costing roughly $400 each, filming the strikes and uploading the footage. A vehicle worth roughly $65,000 carrying a crew of trained soldiers destroyed by a commercially sourced drone assembled in a warehouse.
The open- source tracking organization Orex, which documents only visually confirmed equipment losses, recorded 83 TigerM vehicles and six standard Tigers destroyed, damaged, abandoned, or captured by Ukrainian forces within the first 6 months of the invasion alone. By late 2024, the confirmed capture figure stood at 29 Tigerm vehicles and eight standard Tigers seized intact by Ukrainian forces.
Total losses, including destroyed and abandoned vehicles, are estimated by independent analysts to exceed 100 units. Ukrainian brigades repainted them and drove them back against their former owners. The 14th separate mechanized brigade was among the first documented Ukrainian units to operate captured Russian Tigers in combat.
The vehicle designed to project Russian military power was now firing back at Russian positions. Russia responded. The adaptations accelerated across 2022 and 2023 with a kind of desperate improvisation that told its own story. First came the Arbolate DM remote weapon station, already in limited use before the war, rushed into broader deployment so that roof gunners no longer had to expose themselves to fire the mounted weapon.
Then came crude bolt-on steel plates welded over windcreens, wheel arches, and door panels by frontline crews. Then came the anti- drone cage structures, the so-called cope cages welded above the roof to detonate firsterson view drone warheads before they reached the hull. Then on the 14th of August 2023, the Russian Ministry of Defense placed a formal production contract for the uparmored Tiger MPN variant, quickly nicknamed the Mad Max Tiger by Western analysts for its improvised appearance.
The first of these vehicles was spotted in Ukraine on the 9th of October 2023. It arrived with extra armor plates and reduced rear seating. It was still rated below Stannig level 3. It was still vulnerable to any serious anti-armour weapon. The comparison with the vehicles Russia faced in Ukraine makes the design gap impossible to ignore.
The American HMWV, the vehicle the Tiger was originally conceived to match, had itself been found inadequate in Iraq and Afghanistan and replaced in frontline roles by the MRAP, the mine resistant ambush protected vehicle, specifically the Oshkosh MATV, and later the joint light tactical vehicle. These platforms were heavier, slower, and more expensive.
They were also dramatically better protected. A vehicle that survives an IED and returns to base is worth more than three vehicles that do not. Ukraine received Turkish BMC Kirpy MAPS purpose-built with V-shaped hulls designed to deflect mine blast away from the crew. A Ukrainian serviceman interviewed after combat near Vuluadar described his Kirpie absorbing two firsterson view drone strikes to the front and driving out of the contact area.
A former Turkish soldier who had served on joint patrols with Russian forces in northern Syria put it plainly when interviewed by Defense Blog. He stated that the Tigers had weak armor and almost no mine protection and that Russian commanders had insisted on putting Turkish Kurpus at the front of every convoy, not their own vehicles. Russian commanders knew they had known since Syria.
They had known since the first Chetchin war, which is why the requirement for a better protected vehicle was written into Russian procurement plans as early as 2012 with the VPK 3927 Vulk program. The Vulk was heavier, slower, and significantly better protected than the Tiger. Russia canceled it twice because the Tiger was cheaper, and Ozarmas was already producing it at scale.
Cost one, soldiers paid for it. The Azama’s machine building plant increased Tiger production significantly after February 2022. Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shyigu publicly stated in July 2023 that deliveries from Alzarmas had doubled compared to pre-war levels. Tigers continued to roll out of the factory. They continued to roll into Ukraine and they continued to be destroyed, abandoned, and captured at a rate that suggests the production increase was compensating for losses rather than building a surplus. 23 countries have
operated the Gaz Tiger in some form. China licensed production under the designation YJ2080C and used Chinese-built examples at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Bellarus produces a near clone called the Lisp PM at the Minsk Wheel Tractor Plant. Uruguay operates a small fleet for its Republican Guard.
Slovakia, a NATO member state, purchased a batch for its police service in 2016. The vehicle sold itself internationally on the same terms it sold itself to Moscow. Affordable, capable in low inensity environments, impressively specified on paper. None of those customers have tested it against FPV drones and Stugnip anti-tank missiles in a contested peer environment.
Ukraine has provided that test. The results are documented, confirmed, and publicly available. Return now to the Urpin Bridge. February 25, 2022. The Tiger is burning. 77 men are dead. The three survivors include a special rapid response unit Lieutenant Colonel who did not know he was in Ukraine until the night before. The vehicle that Russia built to replace the Humvey.
The vehicle that marched through Red Square that patrolled the highways of Syria that was exported to 23 countries as evidence of Russian defense industry capability has been annihilated inside 48 hours of the war. It was supposed to demonstrate Russia could win. The Tiger was fast. It was reliable in extreme cold. It could carry a squad and mount a heavy weapon on the right road in the right war against the right enemy.
It was exactly what Russia needed. It had no V-shaped hull. It had no MAP grade mine protection. It had no answer for a $400 drone. It was designed for an insurgency and sent against a peer army. Hundreds of units destroyed, dozens captured and turned against their former operators. An up armor program launched in panic 2 years too late.
A production doubling that could not keep pace with attrition. That is not bad luck. That is the consequence of choosing procurement doctrine over battlefield reality for 30
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.
Share this with someone who needs to be reminded that the right sentence said at the right moment can completely change the entire direction of a relationship. Ring the notification bell for more untold stories about the extraordinary human beings behind music’s greatest legends.
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