As Tank Losses Top 2,000, Russia Is Deploying Museum-Grade T-72s From 1974Russian forces in Ukraine have lost around five tanks, on average, every day for more than 460 days since Russia widened its war on the country.That’s a lot of tanks. The analysts at Oryx, a collective that tallies wartime equipment losses by scrutinizing photos and videos on social media, have counted
no fewer than 2,003 destroyed, damaged and captured Russian tanks. And since some tank losses leave no photographic evidence, Oryx’s count almost definitely is an undercount.
Russia has written off probably around two-thirds of the roughly 3,500 tanks it had in active service before the wider war. Russia’s two main tank plants meanwhile are struggling to build more than a couple dozen new tanks a month, owing in part to a shortage of high-tech components that’s exacerbated by foreign sanctions.
High losses and low production help to explain why most of Russia’s replacement tanks are old tanks that technicians pulled out of open storage, lightly refurbished and sent to the front with few or no major upgrades. A survey of reequipped Russian regiments is like a tour of a tank museum. There are 1978-vintage T-80s, T-62s from the mid-1960s and even T-55s from the late 1950s.
The latest Russian museum tank to roll into combat is the T-72 Ural, the original model of the tank type that has been standard across the Russian and allied armies for five decades. The Uralvagonzavod factory in central Russia manufactured Urals for just a few years before switching to improved T-72 models in the late 1970s.
A 1974-vintage T-72 Ural might look a lot like a T-72B3 from 2023. But on the inside, it’s a totally different—and much cruder—vehicle. One that’s only marginally better than a T-55, and actually inferior to many T-62 models.
Lightly protected, blind at night and slow to calculate range, a T-72 Ural is next to useless in a serious fight on a modern battlefield. It might be a better tank than a 70-year-old T-55. But it’s not better than a T-62MV that went through a deep upgrade program in the 1980s. And we know how the T-62 has fared in Ukraine.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2023/06/01/as-tank-losses-top-2000-russia-is-deploying-museum-grade-t-72s-from-1974/?sh=5f1fbe046efc
