The Russians Are Pulling 70-Year-Old T-55 Tanks Out Of Storage

First the Russian army in Ukraine began running out of its best T-90M, T-80BVM and T-72B3 tanks. So it opened up old tank parks and began pulling out 50- and 60-year-old T-80Bs and T-62Ms.

Now those aging tanks apparently are running out, too. Thirteen months into Russia’s wider war on Ukraine, the first videos and photos have circulated depicting 1950s-vintage T-55 tanks on train cars in Russia, apparently bound for one of the country’s two tank plants, where technicians could recondition them before shipping them onward to the Ukraine front.

It’s testimony to the sheer violence of the Ukraine war—and to Russia’s tactical and operational failures—that it’s taken just a year for Russian and allied forces in Ukraine to write off nearly 2,000 tanks and regress at least two generations, in terms of tank technology.

The T-55 is an upgraded T-54, which was the Soviet Union’s main tank in the years immediately following World War II. The T-54 first appeared in 1946. The T-55 appeared in 1958.

The T-55 weighs 40 tons. It has a crew of four—commander, gunner, loader and driver—and sports a minimally-stabilized 100-millimeter rifled main gun and, at best, an 800-horsepower engine.

Its steel armor is 200 millimeters thick at its thickest—a level of protection that even a single Ukrainian soldier firing a Carl Gustav recoilless rifle should have no trouble defeating. To say nothing of Ukraine’s artillery and mines and, yes, its slowly growing arsenal of Western-made tanks.

The Soviet army finally replaced the last of its tens of thousands of T-54s and T-55s in the 1980s—and placed the survivors in storage as a war reserve.

A war reserve the beleaguered Russian army apparently now is tapping. Don’t expect the 70-year-old tanks to make much difference in Ukraine. Do expect them to get a lot of Russian tankers killed.