That’s funny in a way. They are indeed warming up in their blasted transports and tanks.
It looks like tanks are as obsolete as battleships with the literally thousands of anti-tank weapons like Javelins that have flooded into Ukraine.
I agree that tanks are too vintage for modern warfare, especially in cities.
I guess they had a few thousand hanging around and wanted to use them up before they rust out.
Yes, it'd really be an interesting turn of events of modern man-portable anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons have finally become so effective and commonplace as to negate both armor and close air support on the battlefield. That pushes things back to the WWII level... riflemen, high-altitude bombing and, if it can be brought into range, artillery.
One thing I've noticed, though, in this strangest of Russian military excursions: we're not seeing much of their newest hardware (apart from some AK-12 sightings, that is the recently adopted Kalashnikov update). Tanks, APCs and helicopters all seem to be a generation or so old. Makes the entire thing feel like less than a maximum effort.