This is valuable information. Power weight ratio appears to be highly important, as well as wise use of tank tactics that assume worst case scenarios.
Fully loading on ammo makes the implicit assumption that the limit on effectiveness is ammo amount, not survivability. That means the Ukrainian tank crews actually believed that Russian antitank was utterly ineffective and their biggest worry was not having sufficient ammo. Huh???
As with all choices, it’s a trade off between crew survivability and combat persistence. Fewer rounds in the tanks means your tanks will have lower combat persistence but much greater crew survival changes. Which matched the reality that Ukrainian tank crews are getting attritioned to shit while Russian crew losses are probably fairly low compared to the number of tanks they have lost.
You are reaching the wrong conclusion because you are not considering several critically important factors, such as logistics, deep strike capacity, combat posture and command attitude between the two sides.
The Russians enjoy good logistics support now that they are fighting this war properly. More importantly, they enjoy both air and artillery superiority and are the side on the offensive. This allows the Russians to dictate where and when major engagements take place.
The significance of this is that Russia has the luxury of being able to focus their armour for these major engagements while Ukraine needs to spread their armour out and won’t realistically be able to expect to be able to mass forces and reliably resupply during major combat operations.
That means the big downside of carrying fewer rounds per tank is massively mitigated for the Russians, since they can expect to have more tanks, and can expect to be able to easily rotate tanks in and out of combat as their rounds are depleted to rearm and come back without negatively affecting the momentum of the offensive.
Also, given the zero-shits-given attitude of the Ukrainian leadership to massive Ukrainian troop losses at the front, it’s really no surprise that they will give zero fucks about their own tank crew survival and demand maximum weapons loads.
