March 18, 2024: The war in Ukraine has cost Russia most of its pre-2022 tank force. Russian tanks losses during the initial invasion were huge and eventually Russia had to empty storage sites where 70-year old T-55 and 60-year-old T-62 tanks were kept in case of an emergency. The 2022 Ukraine war turned out to be such an emergency. With all their modern tanks gone, Russia had to depend on the T-55s and T-62s to provide fire support for the infantry, but not fight the T-72 and T-80 tanks the Ukrainian already had as well as the American M1A2 and German Leopard 1 and Leopard 2 tanks supplied by NATO nations.

During two years of fighting in Ukraine, Russia lost nearly 9,000 tanks and other armored vehicles. In 2023 Russia built or refurbished 1,500 tanks. Only 300 were new T-72s and T-90s, the other 1,200 were T-55s and T-62s brought out of storage, refurbished so they could run and even upgraded with a few new accessories.

Russian arms factories are training hundreds of new workers and seeking to produce 300 new tanks a year initially plus eventually 400 or more. This will require Russia to continue to devote more of the government budget to the military and arms manufacturers. Currently 7.5 percent of Russian GDP is spent on defense. This includes recruiting more troops, manufacturing more weapons, and dealing with a personnel shortage. Over a million military-age men have fled the country so far. The government takes advantage of this by giving conscription exemptions to men who move to remote areas where there are arms factories, but a shortage of workers, if they work in the arms factories.

Russia needs a lot of new weapons, including assault rifles, artillery, trucks and especially tanks and other armored vehicles. Russia depended a lot on armored vehicles to defeat the Ukrainians. That didn’t work because the Ukrainian came up with more ways to destroy tanks and inflicted losses Russian has been unable to replace. The Ukrainians used armed UAVs as well as portable anti-tank weapons and anti-tank mines that disable tanks and made them immobile targets for wherever else the Ukrainians have available to finish the job. The Russian crews, which are three men per tank, typically abandon the immobilized tanks before the Ukrainians get any closer. The Ukrainians have captured hundreds of abandoned Russian tanks, many of them in perfect condition. The Ukrainians give the captured tank a new paint job and a few upgrades and add it to their tank force. The Ukrainians don’t use their tanks as recklessly as the Russians and Ukrainian tank losses are much lower.

Russia has another problem with rebuilding its tank force. After the Cold War and the Soviet Union ended in 1991, Russia decided to develop a new tank to replace their existing T-72s, T-80s and T-90s. Worth mentioning is that the model presented by the Russians as new actually draws from a simplified project born at the end of the Cold War. In the 1980s, the Soviet Union intended to build a new generation of tanks to supersede the T-72, T-80, and T-90 tank. Nothing came of that idea, except a lot of money wasted on the radical new T-14 tank. The new tank was not reliable, and Russia was unable to fix the numerous problems with the T-14. Ukrainians captured Russian tanks and noted that some of these tanks, especially the T-90, had a long list of impressive upgrades that were more promising than actual performance. The upgrades were often implemented ineptly and left the tanks worse off. For example, new or upgraded tank engines were unreliable and the use of cheap electronic components meant electronic systems often fail.

Russia has to build more reliable tanks before they build more tanks. Manufacturing unreliable tanks is not popular with tank crews and leads to more of these faulty tanks being lost, many before they even reach the combat zone.