Within a year, Ukraine might need another thousand.Tanks are well-known for their characteristic armor, mounted guns and the continuous metal tracks that carry them over rugged terrain. The scale of Ukraine’s tank needs-1,500 or so active tanks plus a few hundred in the maintenance pipeline or training base-puts into context those 300 or so Leopards, Challenger 2s and M-1s Kyiv’s allies so far have pledged. While big consignments of Polish-built PT-91s-highly upgraded T-72s-could delay the inevitable, the day fast is approaching when the Ukrainians will have to re-equip their brigades with European and U.S. The Ukrainian army must make a big tank transition. While the Kharkiv tank plant could manufacture a few new copies using long-stored components, it’s unlikely the plant could keep pace with losses that, so far, have averaged one T-64 every day or so. Where the Ukrainian army has captured more than 500 Russian and separatist tanks, just seven are T-64s.Īt some point, potentially within a year, Ukraine will run out of T-64s. It’s safe to assume Kyiv won’t be sourcing any T-64s from abroad.Īnd since Russian and allied forces have deployed very few T-64s in Ukraine, there aren’t many opportunities for the Ukrainians to capture intact examples. Three or four decades of open storage can be hard on a tank.Įvery other useable T-64 in the world belongs to Uzbekistan, Transnistria, the Democratic Republic of Congo. It’s anyone’s guess how many are good candidates for reactivation. The tank parks in Kharkiv and Kyiv might hold 450 war-reserve T-64s, according to one recent count by an open-source intelligence analyst. The Ukrainian army’s own reserves are shallower. The Russian army has deep reserves of old but recoverable tanks, including thousands of T-62s, T-72s, T-80s and T-90s. For both sides, that’s half as many tanks as they initially staged for the current war. ![]() The Russians have lost at least 1,500 tanks. ![]() The 1st Tank Brigade ultimately won the battle of Chernihiv.īut Russia’s wider war on Ukraine eats tanks at a startling rate. When Russian tanks rolled past, the T-64BV crews opened fire at point-blank range, counting on their faster autoloaders to give them an advantage over Russian crews. In pitched fighting outside Chernihiv in the early weeks of the current, wider war, the Ukrainian army’s 1st Tank Brigade deployed its roughly 100 T-64BVs into the forests between Chernihiv and nearby Kyiv. The T-64BV is perfectly capable of beating even the newest Russian tanks. The new T-64BV variant boasts modern optics, including a passive infrared sight-no spotlight-plus tightly-fitting reactive armor blocks. The Russian invasion of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014 motivated the Ukrainian defense ministry to revamp the T-64 fleet. Their guns, engines and autoloaders still worked just fine, but their optics-including a passive infrared sight that required a matching infrared spotlight-were outdated and their armor was lacking. The Ukrainian army for its part stuck with the T-64 and, to a lesser extent, a turbine-powered version of the T-80.Īfter five decades, the T-64s were on the verge of obsolescence. While the T-80 factory was in Russia, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Russian army gradually standardized on the simpler, cheaper T-72 and T-90. But the T-64 had Ukrainian DNA and, of course, was manufactured in Ukraine by some of the Soviet Union’s best engineers and skilled laborers. The T-72 meanwhile evolved into the T-90. As a bonus, the T-72 is made in Russia at the Uralvagonzavod factory in Nizhny Tagil.įrom the T-64’s introduction in 1963, the Soviet Union had two parallel tank lines. The resulting T-72 had a simpler but slower autoloader and a less complex transmission. ![]() So while some of the best Soviet formations re-equipped with the Ukrainian-made T-64, the Soviet army launched development of a cheaper alternative. The result was a fast, heavily-armed and thickly-armored tank that, on paper, at least matched contemporary Western tanks.īut the T-64 was complex, hard to build and expensive.
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