Western-made armor is failing in Ukraine because it wasn't designed to sustain a conflict of this intensity, a military analyst told The Wall Street Journal.
Taras Chmut, a military analyst who's the head of the Come Back Alive Foundation, which has raised money to purchase and provide arms and equipment to Ukraine, said that "a lot of Western armor doesn't work here because it had been created not for an all-out war but for conflicts of low or medium intensity."
"If you throw it into a mass offensive, it just doesn't perform," he said.
Chmut went on to say Ukraine's Western allies should instead turn their attention to delivering simpler and cheaper systems, but in larger quantities, something Ukraine has repeatedly requested, the newspaper reported.
The Leo1 isn't lighter it's simply the previous model of Leo and not significantly smaller, very much an MBT. You might be thinking of the Wiesel and generally tankettes.
It is very much an MBT, but it is lighter than most other tanks of this era (40t and rather light armor). The amx-30 is the same. US MBT are heavier and more armored in comparison, and with time all tanks got heavier and more armored still.