The Russian Army Is Crowding Its Best Tanks In One Sector Of Eastern Ukraine

Russian arms firm Uralvagonzavod has manufactured around 600 T-90 tanks for the Russian army.

The 45-ton, three-person T-90 with its 125-millimter gun and steel-composite armor is Russia’s best tank. And it seems no fewer than 50 of them are packed into one small sector of the Ukrainian front around Svatove in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region.

Social media accounts on Tuesday and Wednesday highlighted the T-90 units in Svatove as well as their pre-deployment training with Russia’s Central Military District.

That the Russian army has concentrated its most modern tanks in Svatove speaks to the Kremlin’s priorities as Russia’s wider war on Ukraine grinds into its 10th month.

Svatove, a town with a prewar population of 16,000, abuts the P66 highway, which itself threads through the forest and fields to Severodonetsk, one of the bigger cities in Donbas.

The Ukrainians held Severodonetsk until a combined Russian-separatist force captured the city in July. Liberating Severodonetsk is a top priority in Kyiv. Keeping Severodonetsk is a top priority in Moscow.

Approaching the city from the north—where good Ukrainian brigades are thick on the ground—means going past Svatove. It’s not for no reason the Ukrainian eastern command has assigned the elite 92nd Mechanized Brigade to the effort.

The 92nd Mechanized Brigade is a volunteer unit with well-maintained T-64 tanks and BTR fighting vehicles. Since the start of the current war in February, the brigade has fought, and won, a series of battles in and around Kharkiv Oblast just north of Svatove. Now it’s got Severodonetsk in its sights.

It’s the job of all those T-90s, along with a small number of the latest BMP-T tank-support vehicles, to stop the 92nd Mechanized Brigade.

It’s an impressive feat for the Russian army to mass two battalions of T-90s. Before the current war, the Russians on paper had more than 600 T-90s. But 200 were in storage—and in cold, wet Russia, modern tanks with their delicate optics and electronics tend to degrade fast while not in routine use.

Which is why the Russian army increasingly relies on 1970s-vintage T-62s that also were in storage before the war, but which lack high-tech optics and electronics and therefore don’t degrade as fast as 1990s-vintage T-90s might.

So in fact, the Russian army had just 400 T-90s before February. And after February, it lost at least 36 of the tanks in combat with Ukrainian forces. That brings the total T-90 inventory down to around 360, of which at least 50 now are around Svatove.

They might not last. Tanks are highly vulnerable to small teams of infantry packing precision-guided anti-tank missiles.

A tank’s best defense against enemy infantry is … friendly infantry. But the Russian army never had enough trained infantry to screen its tanks. It has even fewer now that it’s lost 100,000 of its best troops killed or wounded in Ukraine.

Instead, the Kremlin has drafted—or lured into service with huge cash bonuses—hundreds of thousands of unhappy and largely unfit men, many of them in middle age. Barely trained, minimally equipped and ambivalently led, these draftees die fast and easy in battle with hardened Ukrainian troops.

Indeed, the Svatove sector has seen some of the most egregious wastage of Russian manpower. The 362nd Motorized Rifle Regiment lost 2,500 killed—half its manpower—in and around Svatove over the span of just 12 days in mid-November.

Yes, the Ukrainian 92nd Mechanized Brigade as it drives toward Severodonetsk might run into a lot of modern Russian tanks. But it might not run into a lot of well-trained, well-equipped and well-led Russian infantry. And that lack of infantry could make all the difference.