How Many Tanks Russia Can Produce Every Year—And How—Is A Major Mystery
We’ve got some new clues
Workers at Russia’s main tank factory in Siberia are indeed turning old T-90A tanks into upgraded T-90Ms. They’re not, as some observers believed, building all new T-90Ms totally from scratch.
Military blogger T-90K confirmed the T-90A-to-T-90M pipeline by noticing a tiny detail in a photo from the tank production line in 2024.
The distinction matters.
If the Uralvagonzavod tank factory in Sverdlovsk Oblast were mostly or entirely producing T-90Ms from scratch, it would be evidence of enduring Russian capacity for armored vehicle production despite all the sanctions Ukraine’s foreign allies have imposed on the sector.
And that would underscore the long-term nature of the Russian threat.
If Russia can produce a lot of new armored vehicles, it might be able to eventually make good its heavy losses in Ukraine—nearly 23,000 vehicles and other heavy equipment and counting—and re-arm for the current war ... or the next war.
In that context, the evidence of 20-year-old T-90As becoming T-90Ms (with better optics and fire controls) is good news for Ukraine. Uralvagonzavod is feeding “new” tanks to front-line Russian regiments in large part by cannibalizing a few hundred older T-90As.
Those T-90As will eventually run out, if they haven’t already done so.
At that point, the only new T-90Ms will be T-90Ms Uralvagonzavod builds from the tracks up. It’s obviously harder to produce a tank from scratch than it is to upgrade an older tank to a newer standard. The former requires more materials and much more precision welding.
How many T-90Ms the Russians are building has been a topic of intensive debate. There are two main positions.
One, that Russia is building hundreds of new T-90M tanks a year—enough to rebuild some of its battered tank regiments and establish an armored reserve for Russia’s wider war on Ukraine … or for some future war against NATO. That’s the conclusion of a recent study by the pro-Ukraine Conflict Intelligence Team.
The second position, championed by Sergio Miller—an analyst and former British Army intelligence officer—is that Russia is struggling to complete even 100 T-90Ms a year. And many of those it does complete are revamped T-90As rather than all-new vehicles.
Read the rest at Euromaidan Press.
UralVagonZavod has two production lines. Each is capable of 20 T-90M tanks per month. Due to shortages especially of the optical gunsights, they have been building incomplete T-90Ms for the past year and a half. Russia added another factory that had been building BMP variants with an additional two lines expected to cap out at 20 per month each. The top end off they had unlimited parts therefor is 80 per month. Maybe they are cranking out 80 incomplete T-90Ms that are waiting somewhere for parts, but that would no longer be converted older tanks. It is more likely to be a much lower number with some using newly developed Russian-built sights (which they have been working on for years to eliminate that dependency).