The Russian tank factory in Omsk, in Siberia 2,300 km from Ukraine, stopped building new T-80 gas-turbine tanks back in 2001. The simpler diesel-fueled T-72 and T-90 would be Russia’s main tanks for the next quarter-century.

But then Russia widened its war on Ukraine in February 2022—and Ukrainian forces got to work wrecking the Russian tank corps and its 3,000 active tanks, including around 500 upgraded T-80BVs and T-80BVMs.

That’s essentially all the active pre-war tanks plus another 700 older T-80s that Russian forces fetched from long-term storage and refurbished in Omsk before shipping them off to the front line.

The initial order came two years ago. And now the new tanks are “in manufacture,” according to Aleksandr Potapov, CEO of Russian tank-maker Uralvagonzavod.

Be skeptical and adjust your expectations. Before halting production in 2001, the Omsk plant hadn’t manufactured a T-80 totally from scratch since 1991. Instead, it assembled “new” T-80s from a stockpile of chassis and components workers had manufactured years prior.

It’s no wonder that Potapov has been talking about building T-80s from scratch for two years: it might have taken Uralvagonzavod that long just to find new suppliers for the thousands of parts that make up a 46-ton, three-person T-80.

Maybe the Omsk factory is finally piecing together a few new T-80s using 1991-vintage hulls plus recently produced components. The new T-80s could supplement the dwindling number of refurbished T-80s rolling out of Omsk at a rate of around a dozen a month.

There were nearly 1,900 decommissioned T-80s rusting in Russia’s sprawling vehicle parks as recently as 2022. By now, perhaps a thousand of these old tanks have cycled through Omsk for rework. Hundreds of those rebuilt tanks have already been destroyed in Ukraine.

Omsk will eventually run out of old stored T-80s to fix up. At that point, whatever new T-80s it can piece together will be the only T-80s it can deliver to front-line regiments.

1/ From storage base to the battlefield – I’m back with a big research/investigation on Russian T-80 tanks. I’ve tracked the movement of these tanks and am going to uncover refurbishment rates and look closely at storage bases for more insights. Grab a coffee before we start :) pic.twitter.com/yCFvJE36ET

— Just BeCause (@a_from_s) October 17, 2024

Tank hype

It’s worth noting that Russian officials tend to exaggerate how many tanks Uralvagonzavod can produce. It’s possible some independent analysts are guilty of the same tank inflation.

The pro-Ukraine Conflict Intelligence Team recently concluded Russian industry was making hundreds of new T-90Ms every year: enough to keep its best tank regiments fully armed for the wider war in Ukraine … or some future clash with NATO.

“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.”

But according to one expert, CIT is wrong. Sergio Miller, an analyst and former British Army intelligence officer, believes Russia is struggling to complete even 100 T-90Ms a year—and most of those it does complete are revamped T-90As rather than all-new vehicles.

“In total, UVZ only claimed to deliver 100 tanks in 2024,” Miller told reporter David Hambling. “I have no idea where the high figures quoted by some Western reporting come from. There is no evidence this is the case.”

It gets worse for the Russians. So far this year, Miller concluded, Uralvagonzavod has completed 10 or fewer T-90s. With so few new tanks, the Kremlin would struggle to restore its depleted armored regiments.

There are reasons to trust Miller over CIT. Squeezed by sanctions, Uralvagonzavod is probably struggling to source high-tech tank parts such as optics and electronics. In that context, the lower figure for T-90 production makes sense. Likewise, Potapov’s claims about new T-80s already taking shape in Omsk may be inflated.

New production might not be able to halt the steady “de-mechanization” of the Russian armed forces that began with Russia’s first battlefield defeats in the spring of 2022. There are too few tanks left in open storage … and possibly too few tanks rolling out of Uralvagonzavod’s factories.