Ukraine And Russia Are Both Deploying Old T-55 Tanks. Ukraine’s Are Much Better.

Desperate to make good some of the 1,900 or so tanks it has lost in 13 months of hard fighting in Ukraine, and struggling to build new tanks, the Kremlin has begun pulling out of storage 70-year-old T-55 tanks that the Soviet army retired back in the 1980s.

Observers were aghast. The T-55 was obsolete decades ago. In a direct clash with better-equipped Ukrainian forces, the life-expectancy of a T-55’s four crew might be … minutes? And Russian leaders know it. One Russian expert told Volya Media the tanks are “expendable.”

But wait! Doesn’t the Ukrainian army have T-55s, too? Aren’t the ex-Slovenian tanks also death-traps?

Not really. The T-55s that Ukraine got from Slovenia last fall are heavily-upgraded M-55S models. They have modern stabilized guns firing modern ammunition plus effective fire-controls and sights, as well as enhancements to their armor and engines.

The Ukrainians have just 28 M-55s, and they apparently all belong to one unit—the 47th Assault Brigade. The Russians meanwhile might have access to only around 250 recoverable T-55s. An M-55S may never do battle with a T-55, so highlighting the differences between the two types isn’t like handicapping a martial-arts fight.

Rather, comparing Russia’s T-55 with Ukraine’s T-55 variant underscores how dire the former’s situation is. Kyiv can send tankers into battle inside ex-Slovenian M-55Ss and expect them to come home alive. But for the Russian crews of reconditioned T-55s, major combat might be a death sentence.

The T-55 was state of the art … in 1958. The 40-ton tank has a semi-stabilized 100-millimeter D-10T gun, a 500-horsepower diesel engine in early models and steel armor that is 200 millimeters thick at its thickest. Thin enough that a rocket-propelled grenade could penetrate it.

The gunner peers through a TSh-2-22 sight that, to work at night, requires a semi-infrared spotlight that betrays the tank’s position. On early T-55s, the fire controls don’t even include a laser rangefinder. The gunner has to use visual clues—a target’s size in the sight reticle—to guess at the distance.

Factories in the Soviet Union and other countries produced tens of thousands of T-55s through the early 1980s. But as early as 1973, contemporary Western tanks such as the British Conqueror handily were beating T-55s.

The T-55 endured not because it was a great tank. It endured because Soviet and allied strategy, throughout the Cold War, emphasized quantity of forces over quality of forces. And the T-55 was nothing if not numerous.

Slovenia inherited scores of T-55s when it became independent from Yugoslavia in 1991. Constrained by arms embargoes, the Slovenians were desperate for better armor. So they turned to the one friendly country with the right expertise: Israel.

The Slovenian government paid Israeli firm Elbit reportedly tens of millions of dollars to take apart 30 T-55s and rebuild them with better subsystems. Partnering with Slovenian firms for much of the labor, Elbit added to the T-55s a British-designed, stabilized L7 105-millimeter rifled gun—a gun the Brits designed specifically for knocking out … T-55s.

The L7 is an aging weapon but still a highly effective one. It’s compatible with an array of American, British and Israeli ammunition.

Elbit and Slovenian firm Fotonagave the M-55Ss new fire-controls with a laser rangefinder and fresh optics including second-generation night-vision, which doesn’t require a spotlight. The Israelis and Slovenians uprated the T-55s’ diesel engines from 500 horsepower to 600. They added bricks of reactive armor, radically altering the tanks’ profile.

The Slovenian army accepted its last M-55S in 1999. By the fall of 2022, the tanks were redundant. Slovenia transferred all 28 survivors to Ukraine in exchange for 40 heavylift trucks from Germany.

A few months later, the Russians began pulling the first T-55s out of long-term storage. Videos of T-55s on railcars traveling from the 111th Central Tank Reserve Base in Khabarovsk—the resting place of many old T-55s—seem to indicate they’re early-model T-55s. The same tanks that already were outmatched … in 1973.

While the Russians in theory could add to their war-reserve T-55s many of the same new subsystems that make the M-55Ss practically different tanks, they probably won’t.

After all, the whole reason the Kremlin is reactivating T-55s is that Russian industry lacks the components—optics and ball bearings, in particular—to build new T-90Ms and T-72B3s or even restore older T-72s and T-80s. “The T-55 in this sense is a resource-saver and an opportunity to buy time,” a Kremlin source told Volya.

So the old tanks likely will roll into battle with the same guns, fire-controls, optics and armor they had 70 years ago—whereas Ukraine’s own T-55 derivatives have fairly modern guns, fire-controls and optics and some improvements to their armor. They’re not really the same tanks.