In 1993, A Soviet Army Division Left 350 T-80 Tanks In Ukraine. Today, They Fight Against Russia.

The Soviet army’s 20th Tank Division was one of the most powerful ground-combat formations of the late Cold War. The Poland-based division had no fewer than 350 tanks plus hundreds of other armored vehicles.

The division departed Poland in 1993—two years after the Soviet Union’s collapse—and moved east, ultimately abandoning its then-new T-80 tanks in Ukraine. Twenty-nine years later, many of those same T-80s are active again—and fighting the Russians.

The story of the 20th Tank Division’s T-80s is a microcosm of Ukraine’s wider effort to reequip and expand its army with old but upgraded tanks. The updated, ex-Soviet T-80s aren’t the same tanks they were 35 years ago.

But they also are in limited supply. Which helps to explain why Kyiv is so desperate to get as many tanks as it can from its European and American allies.

Those 350 T-80s from the disbanding 20th Tank Division wound up in Ukraine’s sprawling tank parks, including one in Kyiv and another, larger one in Kharkiv adjacent to Ukraine’s vast Malyshev tank plant.

Those tank parks once held thousands of T-55, T-62, T-72, T-64 and T-80 tanks. In the decades between the Soviet Union’s collapse and Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014, Ukraine sold some of the surplus tanks and used others as sources of spares for its dwindling active arsenal of around a thousand aging T-64s and T-80s.

As recently as March 2014, a month after Russian troops stormed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, a photographer could sneak into the Malyshev park and warehouses and just … walk around among the rusting tanks and stacks of tank parts and engines.

Russian aggression changed everything. By 2015, the tank parks were humming again as the Ukrainians scoured them for recoverable vehicles.

The Russians never managed to capture Kharkiv, even though the city lies just 20 miles from the border with Russia. Today the Malyshev tank park might be the main source of 45-ton, three-person T-80s for Ukraine’s army and marine brigades.

The other source, of course, is the Russian army.

Before Russia widened its war on Ukraine last February, the gas-turbine T-80BV mostly equipped a handful of army airborne and marine brigades. The brigades each had a single company with 10 tanks. Ukraine’s total T-80 inventory in February 2022 was just 88 tanks, according to a count by one open-source analyst.

In a year of hard fighting, the Ukrainian brigades have lost at least 42 T-80BVs that analysts can confirm: nearly half the inventory.

But the brigades have stayed in the fight, thanks in part to the roughly 98 T-80BVs that Ukrainian forces captured from the Russians. But the Ukrainians also have access to those hundreds of derelict, ex-Soviet T-80s from the long-disbanded 20th Tank Division.

It’s no easy thing, recovering a tank that’s been sitting in open storage for 35 years. Metal rusts. Rubber seals dry up. Optics cloud.

Ukrainian engineers are an optimistic bunch. “Every tank could be repaired, as long as it’s not been cut in half,” Volodymyr Voronin, deputy director of the Kyiv Armored Vehicles Plant, told the Kyiv Post in 2015.

At the very least, an ex-20th Tank Division T-80 would need new engine components, modern radios, modern optics and fresh reactive armor blocks.

The optics arguably are the most critical new equipment. A tank is only as good as its crew’s situational awareness. The Ukrainian army and marines around 2017 introduced a new thermal sight that combines Ukrainian parts with what appear to be cutting-edge, imported optics.

This TPN-1-TPV allows a tank gunner to identify targets as far away as 4,400 yards, even at night or through smoke. It’s not clear that every Ukrainian T-80BV has the TPN-1-TPV. But those that do are pretty capable tanks.

By inadvertently giving away hundreds of T-80s, the Soviet and Russian armies have done the Ukrainian army a big favor. But the current war eats tanks at a shocking rate, and the Ukrainians eventually will run out of T-80s.

Which is why officials in Kyiv pushed so hard for donations of Western tanks. Ukraine’s allies so far have pledged more than 300 German-made Leopard 1s and Leopard 2s, British-made Challenger 2s and American M-1s.

Two airborne brigades already are training to use the Challenger 2s, potentially signaling the eventual end of the T-80 in Ukrainian service.

It won’t happen fast, of course. Ukraine is getting just 14 Challengers in the first batch. But it’s possible to imagine a time, in the near future, when Ukrainian brigades no longer need to salvage four-decade-old T-80s that once belonged to the Soviet army in Poland.