Russia Has New Tank Production Line—Or Is It Mostly Hype?

How many new T-80s is Uralvagonzavod actually producing?

A captured Russian T-80 in Ukrainian service. Via Wikimedia Commons

The Russian tank factory in Omsk, in Siberia 2,300 km from Ukraine, stopped building new T-80 gas-turbine tanks back in 2001. The simpler diesel-fueled T-72 and T-90 would be Russia’s main tanks for the next quarter-century.

But then Russia widened its war on Ukraine in February 2022—and Ukrainian forces got to work wrecking the Russian tank corps and its 3,000 active tanks, including around 500 upgraded T-80BVs and T-80BVMs.

Forty-three months later, Russia has lost more than 4,000 tanks, including a staggering 1,200 T-80s.

That’s essentially all the active pre-war tanks plus another 700 older T-80s that Russian forces fetched from long-term storage and refurbished in Omsk before shipping them off to the front line.

Increasingly desperate for replacement tanks, the Kremlin has instructed Omsk to resume building T-80s.

The initial order came two years ago. And now the new tanks are “in manufacture,” according to Aleksandr Potapov, CEO of Russian tank-maker Uralvagonzavod.

T-80s at a Russian storage yard. Via @a_from_s

Be skeptical and adjust your expectations. Before halting production in 2001, the Omsk plant hadn’t manufactured a T-80 totally from scratch since 1991. Instead, it assembled “new” T-80s from a stockpile of chassis and components workers had manufactured years prior.

It’s no wonder that Potapov has been talking about building T-80s from scratch for two years: it might have taken Uralvagonzavod that long just to find new suppliers for the thousands of parts that make up a 46-ton, three-person T-80.

Maybe the Omsk factory is finally piecing together a few new T-80s using 1991-vintage hulls plus recently produced components. The new T-80s could supplement the dwindling number of refurbished T-80s rolling out of Omsk at a rate of around a dozen a month.

There were nearly 1,900 decommissioned T-80s rusting in Russia’s sprawling vehicle parks as recently as 2022. By now, perhaps a thousand of these old tanks have cycled through Omsk for rework. Hundreds of those rebuilt tanks have already been destroyed in Ukraine.

Omsk will eventually run out of old stored T-80s to fix up. At that point, whatever new T-80s it can piece together will be the only T-80s it can deliver to front-line regiments.

Read the rest at Euromaidan Press.