Russia’s Best Tank Army Might Have No Choice But To Reequip With 60-Year-old T-62s

Russia’s tank shortage has gotten so dire that the United Kingdom for one believes the Russian army’s best tank formation, the 1st Guards Tank Army, might have to reequip with T-62s from the 1960s or ’70s.

“The Russian military has continued to respond to heavy armored vehicle losses by deploying 60-year-old T-62 main battle tanks,” the U.K. Defense Ministry stated on March 6.

“There is a realistic possibility that even units of the 1st Guards Tank Army, supposedly Russia’s premier tank force, will be re-equipped with T-62s to make up for previous losses.”

If the 1st GTA indeed does get T-62s, it would represent a profound reversal for the once-vaunted tank army and its three divisions and three separate brigades.

Before Russia widened its war on Ukraine a little over a year ago, the 1st GTA, which normally garrisons near Moscow, was slated eventually to swap its T-72 and T-80 tanks for Russia’s newest tank, the high-tech T-14.

But the 55-ton, three-person T-14 with its cutting-edge optics and highly-automated turret always was a boutique vehicle. Each of the dozen or so T-14 prototypes that the Uralvagonzavod tank plant in Sverdlovsk Oblast has produced are hand-built, powered by a delicate Russian copy of a German X-shaped diesel engine and come fitted with high-end electronics that Russian industry can’t manufacture in bulk—and also can’t import, owing to post-invasion sanctions.

Before February 2022, the T-14 was unlikely to enter mass production. After February 2022, a big T-14 run became an industrial fantasy. And that was before the Russian army lost as many as 2,000 tanks in Ukraine.

Today Russia’s two tank factories—Uralvagonzavod and also Omsktransmash in Omsk Oblast—are struggling to produce more than 20 new T-72B3 and T-90M tanks a month while also restoring old, stored T-72s as well as equally aged T-80s even older stored T-62s. The two factories together can refurbish an estimated 50 old tanks a month.

There’s no money or manpower to make T-14s, and there are no parts, either. So when the 1st GTA suffered devastating equipment losses in back-to-back battlefield defeats—first around Kyiv in the spring of 2022 and then again around Kharkiv six months later—the army only could reequip with older tank types.

The problem, for the 1st GTA, is that there aren’t very many T-90s left. Uralvagonzavod has built around 600 of the 50-ton, diesel-powered tanks. The Ukrainians have destroyed or captured at least 40.

There were around 2,000 fairly modern diesel T-72B3s or similar T-72 variants in Russian service a year ago. But the Russians have written off three-quarters of them—and a recent recount by one independent analyst seems to confirm that there are as few as 500 T-72s in recoverable storage.

The situation is equally dire when it comes to the 45-ton T-80. The Russians went to war with around 450 diesel T-80Us and gas-turbine T-80BVs, lost pretty much all of them in Ukraine and have had to restore 45-year-old T-80Bs in order to make good those losses.

As Russia’s tank stocks dwindle, the Kremlin has had no choice but to dip into its vast stock of potentially thousands of T-62s that Omsktransmash built in the 1960s and ’70s and upgraded in the ’80s. The 40-ton tank has four crew and a 115-millimeter main gun, making it a whole other animal compared to the three-crew T-72, T-80, T-90 and T-14 with their autoloaders, three-person crews and 125-millimeter guns.

The T-62 is an antique. Its armor is thin by modern standards. Its optics lack range and clarity. Omsktransmash has installed newer 1PN96MT-02 gunner’s sights and reactive armor blocks on some, but not all, of the 800 T-62Ms it’s been refurbishing for the Ukraine war.

But the 1PN96MT-02 still is obsolete by Western standards, and a few blocks of add-on armor can’t save a T-62 from a Javelin anti-tank missile. In reequipping with T-62s, a Russian tank brigade travels back into the past, technologically speaking—to the 1980s if not the ’70s.

If the 1st Guards Tank Army does indeed get T-62s to replace the hundreds of T-72s and T-80s its divisions and brigades have lost, the once-powerful army will possess just a fraction of its former combat power.

We should know soon. After spending a few months in Belarus resting and inducting fresh draftees, the army began deploying forces—including the 2nd Guards Motor Rifle Division and 47th Guards Tanks Division—south into eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region. Reequipped 1st GTA units could see major combat soon.