Russia's Got Around 800 1970s-Vintage T-72As and Bs. It Plans To Upgrade Every Single One.

The Kremlin needs those 800 T-72s to reach its goal of 2,600 new tanks.

T-72Bs. Via Wikimedia Commons

The Russian armored forces went to war in Ukraine in February 2022 with around 4,000 active tanks—fully half of which were various models of the three-person T-72 weighing as much as 49 tons.

In 44 months of hard fighting, the Russians have lost around 1,800 of those T-72s. Most destroyed—others heavily damaged, abandoned or captured. It’s only slightly exaggerating to say the Russian military has lost every T-72 it had before the wider war.

It’s trying to make good those losses. But output of new tanks at the sanctions-squeezed Uralvagonzavod factory, on the slope of the Ural Mountains, may have collapsed this year—potentially meaning just a trickle of the brand-new T-72B3Ms.

Undeterred, the Kremlin has an ambition plan to produce another 828 T-72B3Ms through 2036. And it’s obvious how it plans to produce them. It aims to restore practically every single 50-year-old T-72A and T-72B left in storage at Russia’s vast, but rapidly emptying, network of vehicle storage yards.