Why Ukraine Capturing So Many Antique Tanks Is Bad News For Russia

You can find old Soviet T-62 tanks in museums all around the world, but the Ukrainians are increasingly capturing them on the battlefield. This is an indicator of just how deeply Russia is having to dig into reserves of old vehicles, and the situation is far worse than you might imagine.

Many nations, like the United States and United Kingdom, only operate one tank variety, which greatly simplifies logistics, maintenance and training. Russia has a patchwork fleet of tanks, a living history of armor development, from the rare and precious T-90M which only started service in 2020, through the T-90A from the 1990s, the T-80 which was mainly built in the 80s, and several different versions of the T-72 – modernized and upgraded, but still based on the original from 1973. There are even a few of the even older T-64.

Losses have been extremely heavy: the indefatigable and painstaking analysts at defense website Oryx have logged every single image of a destroyed, abandoned, or captured Russian tank and the score sheet looks like this:

T-90M 3

T-90A 26

T-80 279

T-72 769

T-64 32

There are also 146 others so badly damaged they were impossible to identity.

These numbers show how Russia is heavily reliant on the older types. But almost five months into the war, something even older turned up: a vintage T-62, which was abandoned on the battlefield and ignominiously destroyed by a Ukrainian drone dropping a grenade through an open hatch.

The T-62 is not supposed to be in frontline service. Analysts speculated that the T-62s would be used to backfill training and reserve units so that more modern tanks could be sent to Ukraine to make up losses, so seeing one in Ukraine was a surprise.

“Their presence on the battlefield highlights Russia’s shortage of modern, combat-ready equipment,” the U.K. Ministry of Defence stated, referring to the T-62s.

In theory Russia has thousands of tanks waiting in giant warehouses and vehicles parks which can be reactivated. According to the Military Balance 2021, quoted in Kyiv Independent, Russia has over 10,000 battle tanks in storage, mainly T-72s and T-80s. However, years of neglect and poor storage conditions (not to mention corruption and theft) means that many of the vehicles have been cannibalized to keep the others running. Some have suggested that only 1 in 10 are still running, but it is hard to know how seriously to take this number: very likely nobody, including the Russians, really knows.

But now the shortage of modern types is forcing Russia to resort to T-62s. This type was first introduced in 1961, and the last one rolled off the Soviet production line in 1975, though North Korea continued to make them for another decade. It has a smaller and less powerful gun than later tanks, so it requires its own unique ammunition. It also has less armor protection, though some captured examples have the useless ‘cope cages’ seen at the start of the war, frameworks set over the turret in the vain hope they would cause anti-tank weapons to detonate before hitting the tank.

The T-62 also lacks the autoloader introduced with the T-72, so it requires a crew of four rather than three, a real headache for an army running short of trained tank crews. The lack of autoloader also means it has a slow rate of fire, which is a critical issue when you have to hit a target rapidly or be destroyed.

More importantly, it lacks modern electronic gear like thermal imagers, a laser rangefinder and modern ballistic computer. This puts it at even more disadvantage in tank vs. tank fights.

“It may be good for gunning down demonstrators or strangling democratic protests in third world nations…but against a highly experienced army, fighting with advanced equipment to defend its homeland, it is utterly hopeless,” as one military blogger put it.

The presence of T-62s indicates that, despite its theoretical armor reserve of thousands of tanks, Russia is running low on T-90s, T-80s, T-72s and T-64s – representing at least three generations of tank — and is now scraping the bottom of the barrel with tanks made when Gerald Ford was president, disco was going mainstream and Bill Gates and Paul Allen formed a little company called “Micro-soft.”

More and more T-62s are showing up in Ukraine. The first loss was in July and the second was not logged until September 16, but with the recent counter-offensive, numbers have been steadily mounting, and 17 have been recorded so far. It is a small proportion of the total, but rising fast.

What is worse is that only four of these T-62s were actually destroyed. The rest – more than 75% — were abandoned or captured, more than likely because of mechanical breakdown. While the tanks may have been roadworthy when they set out, no vehicle of this age is likely to be reliable, and the skills and the spares to repair them are likely to be lacking.

Meanwhile Russia’s much-heralded T-14 Armata super-tank is far from service; a recent video from a Russian tank training ground suggests that there may be problems with the engine.

Seven months into the war, and Russia is fielding tanks which are highly vulnerable not just to Javelins but to much smaller, lighter anti-tank weapons. While a shoulder-launched AT-4 might not be effective against the front armor of a T-90, it will easily punch through the four inches of armor of the T-62, and Ukraine has literally tens of thousands of similar types of weapon.

Some have suggested that the Ukrainians may put these captured tanks into service along with hundreds of others they have already acquired from Russia. However, given the large amounts of more modern equipment on offer, the T-62s may not be worth the trouble; perhaps they could be donated to museums in other counties as a token of thanks for support. The Russians, however, will be increasingly forced to use the old T-62s – and end up leaving them abandoned or dying in them.