In A Few Years, The Russian Army Could Run Out Of Tanks. What Happens Then?

Two or three years. That’s how long the Russian army might have before it runs out of tanks, according to one estimate.

And that’s why it’s not inconceivable that, in the near future, Moscow might do what Kyiv has done—and ask its foreign allies for their tanks.

Russia widened its war in Ukraine with a front-line force of around 2,500 T-90, T-80 and T-72 tanks. In a year of hard fighting, it has lost no fewer than 1,600 of them.

The Kremlin has ordered tank-makers Uralvagonzavod and Omsktransmash to make good those losses, but there are limits to what they can accomplish.

The companies at present lack the capacity and components for large-scale production of new tanks. And there are only so many old tanks in long-term storage that the firms economically can recover and restore for front-line use.

Uralvagonzavod in Sverdlovsk Oblast, in southeast Russia, builds new T-72B3 and T-90M tanks, but slowly. According to Novaya Gazeta, the Russian defense industry currently produces no more than 250 new tanks a year.

But at the present rate of loss, just maintaining the armor corps’ fighting strength requires Russia annually to come up with 1,600 tanks. Barring a once-in-a-generation expansion of Russia’s industrial capacity, production constraints mean 1,350 of those “new” tanks must come from reserve stocks.

It’s a matter of intensive debate just how many recoverable tanks Russia has in storage. Novaya Gazeta estimated there are 8,000 “preserved” tanks. But one open-source analyst counted 10,000 T-72s, T-80 and T-90s in the war reserve.

The problem is, most of those tanks are lined up tread-to-tread in outdoor parks, where they’ve been exposed to rain and cycles of cold and hot that have rusted metal, rotted rubber and degraded sensitive optics.

The open-source analyst assumed just a third of the 6,900 stored T-72s are recoverable. Maybe half the 3,000 T-80s realistically can be restored. There also are a couple hundred new-ish T-90s in storage, most of which should be in reasonably good condition.

So in fact, Russia might have as few as 3,800 repairable tanks in reserve. A Russian source told Novaya Gazeta that Uralvagonzavod and Siberia-based Omsktransmash can restore 600 old tanks a year on top of the 250 new T-72s and T-90s Uralvagonzavod can build.

Do the math. Russia went to war with 2,500 tanks, lost 1,600 in the first year and, over the same span of time, might have built or repaired around 850.

Russian industry in the last year or so also patched up a few hundred 1970s-vintage T-62s, but these tanks clearly were an expedient—and have made exactly one notable contribution to the war effort: providing Ukraine with captured hulls its technicians can modify into engineering vehicles.

The gap, between Russian tank losses and the production or restoration of fresh tanks, isn’t insurmountable. The less effort Uralvagonzavod and Omsktransmash put into “upgrading” an old war-reserve tank, the faster they can provide that same tank to a front-line brigade.

Standards visibly are slipping. Just a couple of years ago, Russian industry equipped new tanks with the latest Sosna-U digital day-night sight—a reasonably modern set of optics that should allow a tank crew to identify an enemy vehicle from two or three miles away under the right conditions.

But the Sosna-U appears to include cloned or illegally-sourced European components. It’s a bottleneck in Russian tank production. Nearly-complete tanks could wait around for years for production of sights to catch up to production of hulls.

So Uralvagonzavod and Omsktransmash have begin delivering reconditioned, war-reserve T-72s and T-80s with the low-tech 1PN96MT-02 analog thermal sight substituting for the Sosna-U.

The 1PN96MT-02 would have been state-of-the-art … in the 1970s. Compared to the Sosna-U, it cuts in half the range at which a tank crew can identify an enemy vehicle.

Uralvagonzavod and Omsktransmash could speed up tank deliveries in order to keep pace with losses—but at a capability cost, and not for long. As the companies recover from storage the last intact T-72 and T-80 hulls, Russia could have just four options. None of them good.

It could dip back into its stocks of 50-year-old T-62s. But T-62s tend to get captured or destroyed nearly as fast as they arrive at the front, so the museum-quality tank is less a solution to Russia’s tank problem than the appearance of a solution.

Alternatively, the Kremlin could invest billions of dollars in a risky bid to expand new tank production.

But every dollar the government spends on Uralvagonzavod and Omsktransmash is a dollar it can’t spend on, say, artillery shells, cruise missiles or fighter jets. Russia’s military needs are wide-ranging and deepening as the war grinds on. Tanks aren’t the only priority.

There’s a theoretical third option—one that has been inconceivable in Russia since the darkest days of World War II. Russia could import tanks the same way it now imports drones, shells and rockets. It just so happens that North Korea and Iran both produce heavily-modified versions of the T-72.

The fourth option of course is to de-armor the army—and equip fewer brigades with fewer tanks. But that would require the Kremlin to rewrite decades-old doctrine so that its suddenly tank-less forces have some guide for how to fight.

It’s worth pointing out, however, that doctrinal flexibility isn’t exactly a Russian strength. If intellectual reform is the alternative, a Russian general might prefer to send his troops into battle in North Korean tanks.