Key facts:
- The Russians are using tanks again after a long break from mechanized warfare
- Heavy losses of modern tanks have compelled them to pull older tanks out of storage
- Roughly 1,000 old T-72As are among the last stored tanks
- The T-72As aren’t very good tanks—but it might not matter
As Russia shifts back to mechanized warfare in Ukraine, it’s dragging practically every available tank from Cold War storage yards—including a thousand crude T-72As from the 1970s.
This is bad news for both sides of Russia’s wider war on Ukraine. The 46-ton, three-person T-72As are some of the last viable tanks left in Russia’s vast network of vehicle parks, which in 2022 overflowed with 40-, 50- and 60-year-old armored personnel carriers, infantry fighting vehicles and tanks.
Three years later, as the wider war grinds on and Russian losses deepen, the storage yards are emptying out.
Russian factories can’t produce enough new vehicles to make good all of the front-line losses—22,000 vehicles and other heavy equipment and counting—so engineers have reactivated thousands of old stored vehicles.
Including, increasingly, all those T-72As. Satellite imagery of Uralvagonzavod, Russia’s main tank factory in Siberia 1,600 km from Ukraine, depicted a few old T-72As lining up outside the factory as long ago as early August. Two months later, there are hundreds of T-72As outside Uralvagonzavod, or UZV.
“Something big is happening at UVZ,” observed independent analyst Jompy, whose scrutiny of commercial satellite imagery underpins our understanding of the ebb and flow of old vehicles from storage yards to front-line service with Russian regiments.
There are “literally hundreds of T-72A hulls parked outside the factory now, when there were zero a few months ago,” Jompy added. “Looks like they’re finally tackling all those stored, until-now-unused older T-72s.”
With their unstabilized 125-millimeter cannons and thin armor compared to later vehicles, the T-72As—thousands of which Uralvagonzavod built in the early 1970s—are not great tanks. But they don’t have to be, one analyst stressed.
“Tanks are tanks, considering they [the Russians] mainly use them as up-armored APCs lately,” Jompy wrote.
Tanks aren’t always tanks anymore
Jompy isn’t wrong about the changing role of tanks. The vehicles’ most sophisticated systems—their fire-controls and the stabilizers that allow their main guns to fire accurately while the tank is moving—are barely relevant in a war where tiny drones, mines, artillery and earthen fortifications matter the most.
Instead of using tanks as tanks, the Russians—and the Ukrainians, to a lesser extend—tend to assign them to two disparate secondary roles. They may sit in dugouts miles from the front line and fire their cannons at distant targets spotted by drones.
In other words, they function as artillery.
Alternatively, they can—as Jompy mentioned—double as armored personnel carriers. Fitted with add-on anti-drone armor and crude shelters for passengers riding on top of their hulls, tanks can speed infantry across the wide no-man’s-land and drop them off right in front of Ukrainian trenches for close fights over those trenches.
As artillery or a do-it-yourself APC, a 50-year-old T-72A is just as effective as a brand-new T-90M. The reactivated T-72As could re-mechanize Russian regiments that have been de-mechanized by heavy losses in the first 43 months of the war.
Russia found 1,000 old tanks in Siberia—they miss when they move, but it’s all that’s left
For much of this year, Russia has been holding back its tanks and attacking with infantry, instead. Tanks are highly vulnerable to drones, of course. But the Russians weren’t holding back their tanks solely to protect them. No, they were saving them up.
In particular, they were saving them for the coming massive assault on the eastern fortress city of Pokrovsk that they’ve been staging forces for for weeks now.
The reinforcements include a large contingent of marines that the Kremlin pulled from Sumy Oblast in northern Ukraine. These reinforcements brought their tanks and other armored fighting vehicles, or AFVs.
“They have prepared a lot of forces and [are] ready for the last, final battle for the rest of Donetsk Oblast,” wrote Kriegsforscher, who flies drones in support of Ukrainian brigades north of Pokrovsk.
“We will see again the usage of AFV columns. And it will be very bloody for both sides.”
Refurbished T-72As may reach the front line too late to participate in the battle for Pokrovsk. But they could arrive in time to replace any tanks the Russians lose assaulting the fortified city.
