![]() ![]() Recent losses reflect the growing proportion of aged tanks in Russia’s front-line arsenal. And most of them might be 50-year-old T-72s and 60-year-old T-62s. It’s hard to say for sure how many recoverable tanks are left in Russia’s war reserve. The only major upgrades any of these aged tanks are getting before Russia’s railway troops ship them to the front are new radios, a few slabs of add-on reactive armor and, in some cases, analog 1PN96MT-02 sights that, while newly made, are obsolete by Western standards. The T-62s are so old that they lack the innovations of every newer Soviet or Russian tank design: a three-person crew with an autoloader replacing the human loader as well as a 125-millimeter gun replacing the previous 115-millimeter gun. To close the gap between demand and supply, Uralvagonzavod and another tank plant-Omsktransmash in Siberia-have been reconditioning hundreds of very old tanks that the Russians have pulled out of long-term, open storage: T-80Bs, early T-72Bs and even T-62Ms and MVs that were built in the 1960s and last updated in the 1980s. Output at Uralvagonzavod seems to have topped out at just a handful of new tanks a month. The only factory in Russia that makes new tank hulls-Uralvagonzavod in Sverdlovsk Oblast-has struggled to acquire the modern Sosna-U digital sights it needs to assemble new T-90Ms and T-72B3s to the best standard. As their losses deepened, the Russians scrambled to source replacements. ![]() After 13 months of hard fighting, the Ukrainian military has destroyed or captured nearly 1,900 Russian and separatist tanks. ![]()
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