Newest Russian Tanks – A year ago, Russian forces poured over Ukraine’s northern border with Belarus both in and around the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Now Ukraine is putting a serious defensive line between its capital and Russia’s client state, with two kilometers worth of landmines and anti-tank fortifications.
The journalist said Russian troops on Wednesday attempted to reclaim the territory but failed to make headway. Tsaplienko reported that the scraps of Russia’s destroyed tank will be displayed in an upcoming May 9 parade commemorating the end of World War II.
Newest Russian Tanks
In the footage, published online in December, a Ukrainian T-64BV and a Russian T-72B3 tank fought a deadly duel in the east of the country. Despite being older, the Ukrainian armor took out its Russian opponent with a single long-distance shot.
A report in Jutarnji detailed the operation, with technical work preparing the helicopters underway at the Aviation Technical Center in Velika Gorica outside the capital of Zagreb. The Hips will join the Ukrainians’ considerable fleet of Mi-8/17 variants frequently seen flying at extremely low altitudes on combat missions near the frontline.
Stavros Atlamazoglou is a defense journalist specializing in special operations, a Hellenic Army veteran (national service with the 575th Marine Battalion and Army HQ), and a Johns Hopkins University graduate. He is working toward a master’s degree in strategy and cybersecurity at Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies.
But in late summer and the fall, Ukraine took the initiative, forcing Russian troops into retreat. The battlefield has largely stabilized, and Ukraine can now afford to send some troops to train for more complicated operations using more complex weapons.
The tank is built on a chassis known as the Armata Universal Combat Platform. Manufacturer UralVagonZavod, a Rostec subsidiary, says it will serve as the common base for a series of armored military vehicles, including APCs and a driverless tank.
The Defense Ministry said the tank was hit by Ukrainian forces with an American Javelin anti-tank missile system near Izyum. The agency reported that an MT-LB armored personnel carrier and an infantry fighting vehicle were also destroyed in the attack.
Forbes also reported earlier this month that the Russians had equipped a number of T-80s with the inferior 1PN96 system. Given that many T-62s had to be reactivated from storage, the modification is likely a necessity brought on by battlefield losses of more capable types and especially sanctions that have impacted Russia’s ability to generate modern electronics.
Many systems, such as armored vehicles’ sensors, were imported from Western countries prior to the war. As Kyiv sought to modernize its military following Russia’s 2014 attack, it had to decide between purchasing a battalion of new armor — about 50 tanks — or modernizing as many as four battalions of older tanks, which could be done for the same price, according to
a Royal United Services Institute report on the first several months of the war. This means that, although Russia can only build 20 new tanks a month, it may soon be able to resurrect 90 or so a month from its boneyards.
Still, that would not make up for the estimated 150 it is losing each month, according to analysis by Oryx. And production may be hampered by shortages of parts. Semiconductors, the computer chips that control modern tanks, are in particularly short supply.
The European Commission claims that Russia is using chips from imported dishwashers and refrigerators in military hardware. Some newly refurbished tanks in Ukraine contain a hodgepodge of hardware from different models and lack high-tech gear, such as wind-speed sensors, which allow accurate shooting.
Ukrainian troops this month began training for combined-arms operations — which require coordination between aircraft, ground troops, artillery, and armored forces — and have begun or will soon begin training on other weapons, including the US-made Patriot air-defense system and
Western armored vehicles. It chose the latter and updated part of its T-64 and T-72 fleets. The modernization packages included digital radios, internal communications, navigation systems, thermal sights, and modified dynamic protection, among other upgrades. Since then, the West has helped Ukraine modernize more of its aging Soviet-era tanks.
Former Deputy Defense Minister and current Deputy Prime Minister Yury Borisov said that the military has procurement deals on two T-14 and one T-15 battalions for military tests. His former colleague Alexei Krivoruchko had said serial deliveries of 132 T-14 and T-15 vehicles were planned by the end of 2021.
Former Russian leader Dmitri Medvedev threatened the arrest of defense industry officials at a tank factory visit last year as supply chain problems snowballed. Furthermore, each passing day is another day closer to modern western tanks and armored fighting vehicles arriving on Ukraine’s side with their own superior optics.
Modern armored warfare depends largely on who can fire the first shot, so having a better or worse set of eyes can prove decisive. In the 1940s Soviet factories could produce more than 1,000 tanks a month.
Plants that made tractors and railway engines were told to build tanks instead. Today ramping up production is harder. The electronics in modern tanks—for night vision, aiming guns and a host of other functions—are highly sophisticated.
That makes production slower and means that many factories designed for other types of manufacturing cannot easily make tanks instead. Russia has only one tank factory left: UralVagonZavod, a huge complex built in the 1930s. But financial mismanagement and huge debts have slowed modernization.
Workers joke that they assemble tanks by hand. Novaya Gazeta, a liberal Russian newspaper, reports that the plant makes just 20 per month. One Western official tells The Economist that, in total, the Russian armed forces’ demand for tanks is outstripping production by a factor of ten.
Ukraine’s requests for newer, more advanced Western-made tanks to replace its older, Soviet-era tanks — some of them older than the troops using them — are longstanding, but before the war, there were financial and logistical limits on the kinds of weapons
Ukraine could acquire. The Ukrainian Defense Ministry said the T-90M is equipped with a powerful engine, panoramic sight with rangefinder, a thermal internal imaging channel, and a fire control system. The new design also features multi-layered armor and ammunition placed outside the unit, according to the ministry.
Multi-channel sight in the tank allows it to fire at all times of the day. As of January 25, the US has committed more than $27.1 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since Russia attacked on February 24, 2022 — a total of less than 5% of the US defense budget that has helped destroy thousands of Russian tanks, armored vehicles
, and artillery pieces. DURING THE second world war Germany’s armed forces destroyed Soviet tanks at a phenomenal rate. But although the Red Army lost 80,000 tanks, the Soviet Union’s industrial might have allowed it to finish the war with more tanks than it had when the conflict began.
In an attempt to meet the demand, Russia has increased the rate at which it restores old tanks, of which it has thousands in storage. In Ukraine modern Russian tanks, such as T-90s, now fight alongside large numbers of T-72B3s, built decades ago but upgraded with guns, reactive armor (which reduces the chance of a hit penetrating the vehicle) and digital communications.
Even with these improvements, older tanks are inferior to new models, and are less likely to survive a hit from Ukrainian forces—but they are still useful. UralVagonZavod rebuilds about eight tanks a month, and three other armored-vehicle repair plants each refurbish around 17, according to Russian media.
Two more plants of similar size are due to come online in the next few months. Russia is not alone in these problems. Ukraine and its allies also lack the ability to produce tanks quickly. Ukraine’s only tank factory, near Kharkiv, was destroyed early in the war.
America, which has promised to send 31 M1A2 Abrams tanks to Ukraine, has one factory, with the capacity to make 15 tanks each month. Production elsewhere in the West is similarly slow, leading to a scramble to find old tanks to donate.
But in general, attacking forces use more tanks than defenders. As the conflict grinds on, Russia is likely to see its fleet steadily decline in both quantity and quality. This time, manufacturing might not save it.
■ Today’s tanks are much more sophisticated and expensive, and are therefore deployed in far smaller numbers. Yet in its war with Ukraine Russia, like the Soviet Union, has lost a huge number of tanks. Ukraine claims to have destroyed more than 3,250.
Oryx, an open-source intelligence blog, has documented 1,700 losses. The International Institute for Strategic Studies, a think-tank, says that around half of Russia’s pre-war fleet of T-72s—which numbered around 2,000 and made up the bulk of its tank force—has been destroyed.
The T-90M tank, which is one of the newest additions to Russia’s T-90 series, is the most technologically advanced battle vehicle within Russia’s frontline arsenal, according to The Drive, and was first issued to Russian military divisions in the spring of 2020
The outlet estimated that only about 100 models are currently in service. The base T-62M dates to 1983, and NATO intelligence first observed the upgraded model during the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan. It represented a considerable improvement over the original tanks, ironically built at the famous Malyshev Factory in Kharkiv, Ukraine, with upgraded armor and fire control systems, as well as a new diesel engine.
It also featured the capability to fire 9K116-2 “Sheksna” (NATO: AT-10 Stabber) anti-tank guided missiles. While the modern Sosna-U panoramic optics found on contemporary T-72B, T-80BVM, and T-90 variants vastly outclass the 1PN96, they rely upon a French-made Thales thermal imager.
Invasion-related sanctions obviously foreclose replacing those Sosna-Us lost in combat or making additional units to retrofit reactivated tanks. Russia’s tanks have failed to give it the advantage in Ukraine, and its forces will struggle to carry out another major offensive without sufficient armored support.
Ukraine has secured battle tanks from its Western allies in recent weeks, which it will probably use in a spring counter-offensive. Russia will need to bolster its own fleet if it hopes to hold on to the territory it has won.
Can it replace its lost tanks this time? Nearly sixty-two years since the first of the Soviet Army’s T-62s entered service, the Russian Army has once again modified the now obsolete tank. The “T-62M Obr. 2022” as shown in this Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) tweet appears equipped with a thermal sight only about half as old as the tank itself.
When the war began, pressure from Russia led Kyiv and its supporters to focus on weapons that were familiar to Ukrainian troops and could be used right away, such as Soviet-origin Mi-17 helicopters and T-72 tanks, or that would be easier
to integrate, such as M113 armored personnel carriers, older air-defense systems, and low-tech drones. That 1PN96MT-02 thermal sight, however, has its roots originally in the early production run of BTR-80 armored personnel carriers in the mid-1980s.
This T-62 isn’t the first Russian tank to gain this aging optic. A late-January tweet from Tank Diary (@TankDiary) shows a train full of T-72Bs equipped with the simpler, older sights. In technical terms, the tanks Russia has deployed are often newer and more advanced than the Ukrainian tanks they’re facing, but the victory of the Ukrainian crew is a testament not only to the quality of their training but to the skill of their engineers and
mechanics, who upgraded many of the older, Soviet-designed models into the tanks Ukraine is now fielding.
Emma Nehls is a military writer and historian with a passion for exploring the intricacies of warfare and the human experience within the military. With extensive knowledge and a deep understanding of military strategy, tactics, and historical contexts, Nehls brings a unique perspective to his writings.
