Russia's Last 1,000 Tanks Are 50 Years Old—But Ukraine Should Still Worry
In a war where drones rule and tanks function as glorified artillery pieces, 50-year-old steel works just fine
As Russia shifts back to mechanized warfare in Ukraine, it’s dragging practically every available tank from Cold War storage yards—including a thousand crude T-72As from the 1970s.
This is bad news for both sides of Russia’s wider war on Ukraine. The 46-ton, three-person T-72As are some of the last viable tanks left in Russia’s vast network of vehicle parks, which in 2022 overflowed with 40-, 50- and 60-year-old armored personnel carriers, infantry fighting vehicles and tanks.
Three years later, as the wider war grinds on and Russian losses deepen, the storage yards are emptying out.
Russian factories can’t produce enough new vehicles to make good all of the front-line losses—22,000 vehicles and other heavy equipment and counting—so engineers have reactivated thousands of old stored vehicles.
Including, increasingly, all those T-72As. Satellite imagery of Uralvagonzavod, Russia’s main tank factory in Siberia 1,600 km from Ukraine, depicted a few old T-72As lining up outside the factory as long ago as early August. Two months later, there are hundreds of T-72As outside Uralvagonzavod, or UZV.
“Something big is happening at UVZ,” observed independent analyst Jompy, whose scrutiny of commercial satellite imagery underpins our understanding of the ebb and flow of old vehicles from storage yards to front-line service with Russian regiments.
There are “literally hundreds of T-72A hulls parked outside the factory now, when there were zero a few months ago,” Jompy added. “Looks like they’re finally tackling all those stored, until-now-unused older T-72s.”
With their unstabilized 125-millimeter cannons and thin armor compared to later vehicles, the T-72As—thousands of which Uralvagonzavod built in the early 1970s—are not great tanks. But they don’t have to be, one analyst stressed.
“Tanks are tanks, considering they [the Russians] mainly use them as up-armored APCs lately,” Jompy wrote.
Read the rest at Euromaidan Press.
