Key Points – Despite suffering extensive tank losses in Ukraine (potentially over 6,000 armored vehicles), Russia maintains its armored forces primarily by drawing upon vast Soviet-era stockpiles and a defense industry geared towards quantity over quality.
-Soviet mass production created tens of thousands of tanks (T-72, T-80, T-64, T-55s).
-While many were scrapped post-Cold War, significant reserves allow Russia to refurbish and modernize older models alongside producing new T-90Ms.
-This ability to replace losses, even with less advanced but numerous tanks, sustains its war of attrition and serves as a stark warning to Western nations about their own limited tank inventories and production capacities.
Russia Keeps Losing Tanks: How Can Putin Keep Fighting?
From the very beginning of the war in Ukraine, Russia has suffered significant equipment losses. It sustained its heaviest losses in the early stages of the war when it used long armored columns to launch assaults against prepared Ukrainian defensive positions.
Today, Russia is more cautious with how it uses its tanks but still sustains a high number of tank losses. Estimates indicated Russia may have lost over 6,000 armored vehicles throughout the war. Yet Russia still sends its armored forces forward, raising the question of how Russia is able to cope with its losses and how much longer Russia can keep this up.
Why Russia Still Has a Lot of Tanks
Most of the tanks Russia now has used belong to the Soviet Union. During the Cold War, The USSR sought to achieve numerical superiority to gain an advantage over NATO in the event of another war in Europe. To that end, Soviet tank manufacturers focused on building as many tanks as humanly possible. From the T-55 to the T-72, the USSR mass-produced tanks as if their lives depended on them. From 1972-1990, the Soviets produced around 30,000 T-72s alone, in addition to around 7,000 T-80s and 12,000 T-64s, many of which ended up back in Ukraine. This number excludes the insane amounts of T-54/55s in storage.
Tank production slowed to a crawl in the 1990s as the USSR, later Russia, faced insane financial difficulties and the economy collapsed. As relations between Russia and the West briefly improved, Russia dismantled much of its Soviet stock as a gesture of goodwill. The Russian tank force went from about 22,000 active units to about 6,000. It is estimated that Russia scrapped around 30,000 tanks in the early 2000s, a staggering blow to what was once the mightiest force in Europe.
From Storage to the Front
As the Russian economy got back on its feet, so did tank production. Russia’s largest tank manufacturer, Uralvagonzavod (UVZ), received an order for over 1,500 T-90s from India, which may have saved Russian tank manufacturing from bankruptcy. Additionally, the Russian army began expanding its tank fleet. With relations with the West souring, Russia increased its production and modernization of tanks.
Measuring the total output of Russian tanks is a difficult task. The vast majority of UVZ’s outputs are modernized tanks of various models with newly produced T-90Ms. In 2021, one year before the invasion, Russia received an estimated total of 1,530 new, modernized, or otherwise refurbished tanks, supposedly 3.6 times the production in 2020.
Following the invasion of 2022, Russia was quick to reach back into its Soviet stockpiles, leading many to suspect that Russia was already running low on main battle tanks. With the appearance of T-62s and T-55s in Ukraine, analysts doubled down on the idea that Russia was on the verge of a major tank drought. The vast majority of Russia’s tank outputs aren’t new tanks but rather refurbished and modernized T-72s from their old stockpiles.
Russian tank production carries on despite the high losses on Russia’s side and over 5,000+ sanctions from the West. Exact production figures from UVZ are hard to come by, and estimates range all over the place, with some saying that Russia can produce 200 tanks per year and others claiming that Russia can produce around 100 tanks per month. In any case, by all objective measures, Russian tank production is increasing, not decreasing, and it isn’t going to stop anytime soon. Even with the most conservative estimates, Russian tank production is still greater than the entirety of NATO combined.
Can Russia Cope With Its Losses?
How is Russia still able to keep up with its losses despite all the sanctions placed on its defense industry? The simple answer is that the Russians chose quantity over quality. Much like the Soviets during WWII, the Russians chose to produce cheaper, lighter, and easier tanks to mass-produce. This puts the overall quality of the Russian tanks well below that of Western opponents but offers a significant numerical advantage. As WWII shows, wars of attrition are won with numbers.
Whoever can field and sustain more tanks will be victorious. In Ukraine’s case, the numerical advantage lies firmly with Russia, even with assistance from 40+ countries.
While Russia’s tanks are cheap and robust, their simplicity is one of their greatest strengths. The T-72 is a good example of this. Despite being long outdated, it is cheap, generally reliable, and easy to maintain and manufacture, hence why Russia has kept it as the backbone of its tank fleet.
Russia’s industry has faced many challenges during its war with Ukraine, yet despite that. It has still been able to keep up with military needs while still operating in peacetime mode.
Because of its large stock of Soviet tanks and manufacturing, Russia has been more or less able to cope with its tank losses. Russia’s example should serve as a brutal wake-up call to the West. Should the US or Europe enter into a similar conflict, NATO needs a large stock of tanks and a manufacturing base that can deal with expected losses, which NATO does not have at the moment.
About the Author:
Isaac Seitz, a Defense Columnist, graduated from Patrick Henry College’s Strategic Intelligence and National Security program. He has also studied Russian at Middlebury Language Schools and has worked as an intelligence Analyst in the private sector.
Russia’s Military in Focus
Pingback: Europe Is Trying Wreck Trump's Plan to End the Ukraine War - National Security Journal