- Russia is making "new" T-90M tanks out of old T-90As
- There is a limited pool of T-90As
- As those older tanks run out, T-90M production could drop
- That's good news for Ukraine ... and its allies
Workers at Russia's main tank factory in Siberia are indeed turning old T-90A tanks into upgraded T-90Ms. They're not, as some observers believed, building all new T-90Ms totally from scratch.
Military blogger T-90K confirmed the T-90A-to-T-90M pipeline by noticing a tiny detail in a photo from the tank production line in 2024.
T-90A are infact being modernized into T-90M.
— T-90K (@T_90AK) October 1, 2025
And they've been doing it for quite a while, now.
This picture is over a year old. pic.twitter.com/9F8V0LWWaS
The distinction matters.
If the Uralvagonzavod tank factory in Sverdlovsk Oblast were mostly or entirely producing T-90Ms from scratch, it would be evidence of enduring Russian capacity for armored vehicle production despite all the sanctions Ukraine's foreign allies have imposed on the sector.
And that would underscore the long-term nature of the Russian threat.
If Russia can produce a lot of new armored vehicles, it might be able to eventually make good its heavy losses in Ukraine—nearly 23,000 vehicles and other heavy equipment and counting—and re-arm for the current war ... or the next war.
In that context, the evidence of 20-year-old T-90As becoming T-90Ms (with better optics and fire controls) is good news for Ukraine. Uralvagonzavod is feeding "new" tanks to front-line Russian regiments in large part by cannibalizing a few hundred older T-90As.
Those T-90As will eventually run out, if they haven't already done so.
At that point, the only new T-90Ms will be T-90Ms Uralvagonzavod builds from the tracks up. It's obviously harder to produce a tank from scratch than it is to upgrade an older tank to a newer standard. The former requires more materials and much more precision welding.
How many new T-90M tanks?
How many T-90Ms the Russians are building has been a topic of intensive debate.
There are two main positions.
- One, that Russia is building hundreds of new T-90M tanks a year—enough to rebuild some of its battered tank regiments and establish an armored reserve for Russia’s wider war on Ukraine … or for some future war against NATO.
That’s the conclusion of a recent study by the pro-Ukraine Conflict Intelligence Team. - The second position, championed by Sergio Miller—an analyst and former British Army intelligence officer—is that Russia is struggling to complete even 100 T-90Ms a year. And many of those it does complete are revamped T-90As rather than all-new vehicles.
Journalist David Hambling was the first to report on Miller’s claim.
T-90K's sharp eye should lend credence to the latter position. Whatever number of T-90Ms Uralvagonzavod is delivering every year, many are upgrades of a shrinking pool of T-90As.
Why this matters for Ukraine's fight
That Uralvagonzavod is turning T-90As into T-90Ms doesn't necessarily inform the competing estimates of total tank production. That's still very much up for debate.
Has there been a “dramatic fall-off” in tank production, to borrow Hambling’s phrasing? Or is Uralvagonzavod churning out fresh tanks at a rate faster than any tank factory in a Western country?
“According to our estimates, Uralvagonzavod produced 60 to 70 T-90M tanks in 2022,” CIT reported. “In 2023, amid efforts to mobilize the defense industry, output may have increased to 140 to 180 tanks, and by 2024, it may have surpassed 200 units annually, possibly approaching a production rate of 250 to 300 tanks per year.”
The word “may” is doing a lot of work here, but it’s worth noting that CIT isn’t alone in perceiving an increasing rate of tank production. A few months ago, Czech analyst Jakub Janovsky concluded Uralvagonzavod has been building between 150 and 200 T-90Ms annually.
For comparison, the US Army’s own tank plant in Ohio has been producing just a few dozen M-1 Abrams tanks annually—down from 90 a year in the early 2020s.
To be fair to the Americans, they’re not mired in a costly war. At the same time, the Russian military has shifted to infantry-led assaults in Ukraine, and now deploys—and loses—just a few tanks every month.
That shift means any fresh tanks Russia produces—through new production or by fetching old Cold War tanks from long-term storage and upgrading them—can go toward replacing the roughly 4,000 tanks the Russians have lost in Ukraine.
Can Russia restore its depleted armored regiments?
Unless the fighting in Ukraine shifts back to mechanized operations, this restored tank corps can be held in reserve.
But that’s a moot point if Miller is right and Uralvagonzavod, or UVZ, isn’t building very many T-90Ms.
“In total, UVZ only claimed to deliver 100 tanks in 2024,” Miller told Hambling. “I have no idea where the high figures quoted by some Western reporting come from. There is no evidence this is the case.”
In addition to taking Uralvagonzavod’s delivery announcements at face value, Miller scrutinized images of tank shipments in Russia to arrive at his lower production figure. In the first half of this year, he concluded, Russia completed 10 or fewer T-90Ms. It's possible most of them used to be T-90As.
With so few new tanks, the Kremlin could struggle to restore its depleted armored regiments.
Why T-90M production may be freefalling—if indeed it is—isn’t hard to guess. “The dramatic fall-off suggests that after they ran out of T-90As to upgrade, UVZ has struggled to make new T-90Ms,” Hambling wrote.
T-90A are infact being modernized into T-90M.
— T-90K (@T_90AK) October 1, 2025
And they've been doing it for quite a while, now.
This picture is over a year old. pic.twitter.com/9F8V0LWWaS