Forbes: 70-year-old T-55 tanks "expendable" in Ukraine

An independent Russian newspaper—one of the few left in the country—asked some hard questions about those 70-year-old T-54 and T-55 tanks the Kremlin is pulling out of long-term storage, presumably for front-line use in Ukraine.

The answers Volya Media’s reporter got are startling, Forbes reports.

Forty years after the Soviet army retired its last active T-54/55s, there might be just 250 of the 40-ton, four-person tanks that are intact and recoverable. The Russian army intends to deploy them to Ukraine—and use them as tanks, not as artillery—in order to buy time for Russian industry to try to ramp up production of new T-72B3s and T-90Ms and modernization of older T-80Bs, T-72Bs and T-62Ms.

And yes, the Russians know the T-54/55s with their minimally-stabilized 100-millimeter guns and thin armor—200 millimeters at its thickest—won’t last long in combat with the increasingly experienced and well-equipped Ukrainians. “They are expendable,” one expert told the reporter.

The newspaper’s fearless reporting on the T-54/55 confirmed what many observers believed—that Russia’s two tank factories are struggling to complete new tanks and also struggling to modernize the hundreds of older tanks the Russians have been pulling out of long-term storage.

Ball-bearings and electronics—fire-controls and optics, presumably—are in short supply, owing in part to foreign sanctions that have throttled Russia’s imports. Chinese firms have sold some bearings to Russian industry, but at exorbitant prices. Meanwhile, the Russians slowly are establishing local production of fire-controls and optics, the Volya reporter pointed out.

But it could take months or years to increase the supply of tank components. So in the meantime, Russia’s two main tank factories—Uralvagonzavod in Sverdlovsk Oblast and Omsktransmash in Siberia—are shipping just a handful of new and reconditioned tanks a month. Far too few to make good the 150 or so tanks the Russians lose in Ukraine every month, on average.

The state of Russian tank production is a matter of controversy. But Volya’s reporting aligns with what independent analysts have noted: that Uralvagonzavod and Omsktransmash are beginning work on many hundreds of armored vehicles but completing very few owing to the shortage of parts. Unfinished tanks and fighting vehicles are just ... lying around.

The benefit of the T-54/55 is that it doesn’t require many bearings, or much in the way of sophisticated electronics, in order to move and shoot. It’s much easier to recover from decades of open storage. “The T-55 in this sense is a resource-saver and an opportunity to buy time,” a Kremlin source told Volya’s reporter.

Now is an especially bad time for the Russian army in Ukraine to suffer a shortage of tanks. With Russia’s winter offensive grinding to a bloody halt in the muddy fields around Bakhmut and Vuhledar, Ukraine is poised finally to launch its long-anticipated counteroffensive—possibly as soon as the thawing ground dries a bit.

“Russian armored vehicle losses are currently constraining the Russian military’s ability to conduct effective mechanized maneuver warfare in stalling offensives in Ukraine,” the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, DC noted. “Russian forces may be deploying T-54/55 tanks from storage to Ukraine to augment these offensive operations and prepare for anticipated mechanized Ukrainian counteroffensives.”

It doesn’t seem to bother Russian officials that the T-54/55s are hopelesssly obsolete. After losing around 2,000 tanks, the Russians are desperate for any mobile, protected firepower. Even if it’s not reliably mobile, highly protected or very heavy on actual firepower. “In the current situation, it makes no difference which tank comes to the front line,” a Kremlin official said.

No one disagrees that, even under the best of circumstances, a major expansion of new tank production in Russia could take years. For now, most of the Russian army’s few replacement tanks will be old tanks. The only question is—how old?

Given the shortage of high-tech components, the answer—for the next few months, at least—is really old. Potentially 70 years, if those T-54s and T-55s we’ve seen on railcars are any indication.

But if Volya’s reporting is accurate and there are just 250 recoverable T-54/55s, even those ancient tanks are a short-term solution to a worsening, long-term problem.