Russia has lost thousands of tanks in Ukraine—yet its armored fleet may now be larger than before the war. How is that possible? We examine the numbers, Soviet-era stockpiles, Russia's tank production, and why drones have fundamentally transformed modern armored warfare. From T-72s and T-90Ms to FPV drones and "turtle tanks," discover why rebuilding an army of tanks may no longer guarantee battlefield success. Subscribe to The Military Show for more in-depth military analysis.
⏱️ CHAPTERS:
00:00 - Russia Tank Losses in Ukraine Exceed 4400
02:46 - Russia Rebuilds 7342 Tanks from Soviet Boneyards
06:23 - Russian T72 T80 and T90 Tanks Explained
12:29 - Russian Tank Autoloader Flaw Causes Turret Toss
16:11 - Ukraine FPV Drones Cause 65% of Tank Losses
19:12 - Will Russia Run Out of Tanks in 9 Months?
Support us directly as we bring you independent, up-to-date reporting on military news and global conflicts by clicking here: https://www.youtube.com/@TheMilitaryShow/join
#militarystrategy #militarydevelopments #militaryanalysis
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SOURCES: https://pastebin.com/JmKT52jf
⏱️ CHAPTERS:
00:00 - Russia Tank Losses in Ukraine Exceed 4400
02:46 - Russia Rebuilds 7342 Tanks from Soviet Boneyards
06:23 - Russian T72 T80 and T90 Tanks Explained
12:29 - Russian Tank Autoloader Flaw Causes Turret Toss
16:11 - Ukraine FPV Drones Cause 65% of Tank Losses
19:12 - Will Russia Run Out of Tanks in 9 Months?
Support us directly as we bring you independent, up-to-date reporting on military news and global conflicts by clicking here: https://www.youtube.com/@TheMilitaryShow/join
#militarystrategy #militarydevelopments #militaryanalysis
#themilitaryshow
SOURCES: https://pastebin.com/JmKT52jf
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NewsTranscript
00:00The war in Ukraine has raised on for over four years, and is the bloodiest conflict Russia has
00:05seen since World War II. But it's not just humans that have been lost in the battle,
00:09it's machines too, specifically Russian tanks. The numbers here are genuinely staggering,
00:15but they also come with a big asterisk, since sources vary. The most conservative,
00:19defensible figures belong to Oryx, the open-source intelligence project that counts only losses it
00:25can verify with a photograph or a video. Thus, Oryx has confirmed somewhere in the neighbourhood
00:30of 4,400 Russian tanks destroyed, damaged, abandoned, or captured between February 2022
00:36and June 2026. But after all that, Russia has been churning out replacements, and may actually
00:43be on the verge of having more tanks in active service than before it started its so-called
00:48special military operation, according to some sources. That sounds like something which should
00:53make Kyiv nervous. And yet, the dirty secret behind that growing fleet is that Russia can
00:58barely use it. Because in the time it took Moscow to rebuild its armoured juggernaut,
01:04Ukraine quietly did something far more devastating than destroying tanks one by one.
01:09Ukraine changed the battlefield itself, and in doing so, turned the main battle tank,
01:13which had ruled ground warfare for a century, into something close to a liability.
01:17By comparison, Ukraine's confirmed tank losses sit at roughly 1,400, and Oryx itself suggests that
01:24this is a floor, not a ceiling, because again, it only counts losses that it can verify with a photo
01:30or video. So the true number of vehicles destroyed may be significantly higher than the records.
01:35A secondary aggregator suggests that these accounts only display between 50 and 70 percent
01:41of actual Russian tank losses, which means the true number might be higher,
01:46plausibly in the range of 6,300 to 8,800 tanks. The Ukrainian general staff, for its part,
01:53claims figures north of 10,000. While that number may be close to the reality,
01:58it's coming from a government that stands to gain from its enemy's dead machines, so treat it as the ceiling.
02:04But regardless of what numbers you take, at minimum, Russia has lost the equivalent of its entire
02:08pre-war active tank fleet, and probably closer to double that. According to the International
02:14Institute for Strategic Studies, Russia went to war with roughly 3,000 tanks in active service,
02:20and probably had triple that in storage. And the Institute calculated that in just the first
02:2413 months of fighting, between February 2022 and March 2023, Russia lost nearly 1,900 of those
02:32active tanks. More than half the standing fleet was gone in little over a year.
02:37No army in the modern era has hemorrhage armor at that rate.
02:41So how, after all of that, is Russia about to field more tanks than it started with?
02:46Well, the answer lies in that storage we mentioned. Most of the tanks in there were stockpiled from
02:51the Soviet Union era, where old units were just left with occasional maintenance. The IISS claimed that
02:57there could be 9,000 tanks in reserve, while some outlets suggested the number could very well
03:02have five figures. An OSINT's researcher, Jompi, used satellite imagery of tank yards to count a more
03:08modest number of 7,342 tanks. And when the losses started piling up in 2023 and 2024, the Kremlin had
03:17a
03:18problem with simple arithmetic. Some experts claim that Russia's only plant-building genuinely new tanks
03:23from scratch, Ural Vangonzavo, the Nizhny Tarjil, can produce only around 250 new modern T-90M tanks a year.
03:32The Oms-Transmash plant can make another 150 T-80 BVMs, a modernized version of an older model.
03:39That's only 400 per year against the losses that averaged at least 85 per month.
03:44So, Russia had to turn to those boneyards of thousands of old tanks from the Soviet Union.
03:49Every other so-called new tank reaching the front ended up not being new at all. It was an old
03:54Soviet
03:55hull, pulled from storage, stripped, refitted with fresh optics, radios, and reactive armor bolted
04:01onto the sides and pushed back into service. But here's where it gets almost absurd, and where you
04:06start to see Russian industry doing things that border on archaeology. As Russia worked through the
04:11easier candidates, it eventually reached the older tanks in the yards, around 1,000 T-72As,
04:17dating from the early 1970s. These machines were so degraded that their engines were considered
04:23dead. So, in September 2024, an industry representative told the State Duma's Defense Committee that
04:30Russian industry had launched a so-called new regeneration program, taking the old engines
04:35that powered these 45-ton tanks and rebuilding them with new internal parts, essentially resurrecting
04:41engines that had been written off as scrap.
04:43The catch was that this program was only expected to produce around 100 working engines, enough
04:49for about 10% of those stored T-72As. So, in December 2024, Russia doubled down, with the
04:57Khingysiep machine building plant in Leningrad Oblast signing a contract to refurbish a different,
05:02more powerful engine that also fits the T-72A. Russia was so determined to put 50-year-old tanks
05:09back on the road that it stood up an entire industrial effort to bring dead engines back
05:14to life. With fresh components, a 1970s T-72A could be brought up to something roughly resembling
05:20a modern T-72B3M, though never as well protected. The analyst Jompier said that this was the moment
05:27he became convinced Russia intended to restore nearly its entire stored fleet anything that
05:32was not completely rusted through. So, let's actually do the tank math, because it's the
05:37spine of this whole story. As we mentioned, Russia started with roughly 3,000 active tanks,
05:43it lost somewhere around 4,400 confirmed, up to around 6,000. New production has added
05:49perhaps 1,600 tanks across the two most modern models. And the storage drawdown could have yielded
05:55around 5,000 recoverable hulls after you subtract the roughly 2,100 that were either rusted beyond
06:01saving or belong to the old T-64 family. When you add all that up, the Russian ground forces
06:07could be fielding somewhere between 3,600 and 5,200 tanks based on the lower limit of losses.
06:15That upper figure is almost twice the starting force. So, on paper, Russia has rebuilt its armoured
06:21force and made it bigger. But that same force is also, increasingly, comprised primarily of museum
06:27pieces. To understand why, we need to look exactly what kinds of tanks are in this fleet,
06:32because not all tanks are created equal, and Russia's line-up tells you everything about a
06:37military stretching backward through time to keep its formations full. Now let's start with the work
06:42course, the T-72. First rolling off Soviet lines in 1972, the T-72 was designed to be cheap,
06:50simple, rugged, and producible by the tens of thousands, the armoured equivalent of the AK-47.
06:57And it's everywhere, being the most common tank on both sides of this war, as Ukraine inherited huge
07:02numbers of them too. The modern Russian frontline versions are the T-72B3 and the upgraded T-72B3M,
07:10with better fire control and reactive armour. But the T-72 is also the tank that turned into a global
07:16meme for catastrophic destruction. By Oryx's visually confirmed count, Russia has lost on the order of
07:221,800 T-72s, more than any other single type. The reasoning for that is baked into the tank's design,
07:29which we'll come back to later, after we run through the other types.
07:33The second model is the T-80, which suffers from its own share of problems. Introduced in 1976,
07:40it was the world's first mass-produced tank powered by a gas turbine engine, the same basic principle
07:46as a helicopter or a jet, which made it blisteringly fast and quiet for its size, able to hit 40
07:52miles
07:52an hour across open country. The Soviets and later Russians built roughly 5,400 to 5,500 of these tanks,
08:00with production extending until 2001. In Ukraine, the T-80 has been ground down relentlessly. By December
08:082024, open-source counts confirmed at least 1,000 T-80s destroyed, damaged, abandoned or captured,
08:15and some analysts argue Russia has effectively burned through its entire deployable T-80 fleet,
08:21though that stronger claims should be treated as an estimate rather than a settled fact.
08:25Russian commentators have suggested Moscow had committed around 90% of its available T-80s,
08:31funnelling the survivors back to the Omsk plant in Siberia to be rebuilt into the latest T-80 BVM
08:37standard. Russian tank crews are said to have given the T-80 a grim nickname, the steel coffin,
08:43after watching too many of them lose their turrets in a single violent instant.
08:47At the top of the lineup sits the T-90, and specifically its most modern form,
08:52the T-90M Prariv, which is the tank Russian President Vladimir Putin's propaganda machine
08:58likes to call one of the best in the world. The T-90 itself derived from the T-72,
09:03but layered with improvements. Better gun and fire control system, relict reactive armor,
09:09the Sosna-U gunner's sight, and a commander's panoramic sight that brings it closer to western
09:14standards, it's the best tank Russia actually fights with. And yet, it's been dying in numbers
09:20that exposed the entire problem. Oryx figures for June 2026 point to somewhere over 220 T-90 variants
09:28lost, with 155 of those being the T-90M. But there's another crucial piece of information that
09:34might be shocking. Russia is believed to have started the war with fewer than 70 T-90Ms,
09:40in 52 months it's lost more than twice that many. So, those earlier figures suggesting the factory can
09:47output 250 of them in a year, possibly the result of the propaganda machine. And then, when even the T
09:53-72
09:54stockpiles started running thin, Russia was fully desperate. It went past the 1970s, past the 1960s,
10:01and pulled out the T-62, a tank that entered service in 1961, and the T-55, a design whose
10:08heritage extends back to the immediate post-war Soviet tank programs. These are antiques with thinner
10:14armor, less capable guns, and ammunition storage arrangements that are, if anything, even more
10:20dangerous than the newer tanks. Seeing T-55's rumble toward the front in the 2020s was, for many
10:27analysts, the single clearest signal that Russia was scraping the bottom of the barrel, trading away
10:32every advantage of quality for the brute reassurance of quantity. A tank from 1946 can still kill you,
10:39but it's not going to win you a modern war, and Russia knows it.
10:43Now, if you want more detailed analytics like these, make sure to subscribe to The Military Show.
10:48We post videos on everything important going on in the world.
10:52Now, all of this brings us to the crux of this entire story, the tank that was supposed to change
10:57everything and ended up being a flop, the T-14 Armata. When Russia first paraded the Armata through Red
11:05Square in 2015, it was billed as a revolution. A genuine next-generation tank with an unmanned turret,
11:11a protected crew capsule, an active protection system designed to shoot incoming missiles out
11:17of the air, and a design explicitly built to defeat the Western contemporaries.
11:21But in the largest tank war of the 21st century, where Russia has been desperate enough to deploy
11:27machines from 1946, the Armata has been almost completely absent. It made a brief cautious appearance
11:33in 2023, reportedly used only in a rear indirect fire role, and was withdrawn within the month.
11:40The official explanation was that the Armata was simply too expensive, and that it made more
11:44sense to buy a larger number of cheaper vehicles. Reported unit costs run somewhere between $5 million
11:50and $9 million, far more than a T-72, T-80 or T-90, and because it's an entirely new
11:57platform,
11:58it couldn't even use the existing production lines. Now, it would be easy to mock the Armata as a parade
12:04prop, but there is a more interesting counter-argument worth taking seriously. In some ways,
12:09the T-14 is not really a design failure at all, but a casualty of timing, a superb tank delivered
12:15into a war that no longer rewards superb tanks. In an era where a $1,000 drone can disable a
12:22multi-million dollar vehicle, pouring those millions into a single tank is basically suicidal.
12:27Which brings us to the crux of the issue. We've established that Russia has rebuilt a massive fleet of
12:33mostly Soviet-era tanks. So why, exactly, did all these tanks fail so catastrophically in the first
12:39place? The answer comes in three distinct layers. The first layer involves a vulnerability of the
12:45T-72 design that appears repeatedly in footage, even if you didn't know where you were looking at.
12:50A Russian tank is hit, there's a flash, and then the entire turret is hurled dozens of feet into the
12:55air. Soldiers and analysts call it the jack-in-the-box effect, or the turret toss. This is a quirk
13:01of the
13:02tank's original engineering. Russian tanks like the T-72, T-80 and T-90 use an automatic loader,
13:09instead of a human one, which lets them run with a smaller three-man crew and a lower,
13:13harder-to-hit profile. To feed that auto-loader, the tank stores its ammunition, around 20 ready
13:19rounds, in a carousel ring at the base of the turret, right in the center of the vehicle, which
13:24surrounds the crew compartment. When a penetrating hit reaches that ring, even one propellant charge can
13:30trigger a chain reaction that detonates the entire stockpile at once. The pressure has nowhere to go
13:36but up, blowing the turret clean off. The contrast with Western tanks is the part that really exposes
13:41the trade-off. A tank like the American M1 Abrams stores its ammunition in a separate compartment in
13:48the rear of the turret, sealed off from the crew by an armored door and fitted with blowout panels.
13:53When that ammunition is hit, the panels are designed to vent the explosion up and out,
13:57away from the crew compartment. The crew can and have survived ammunition fires that would
14:03have annihilated a Russian crew instantly. Now, the Soviet designers were not stupid.
14:08They made a deliberate choice, accepting a catastrophic failure mode in exchange for a
14:13smaller, lighter, cheaper tank that was easier to mass produce, easier to transport by rail,
14:18and harder to spot on the battlefield. For the kind of war Soviet planners imagined,
14:23a fast continental clash where individual tank survivability mattered less than overwhelming
14:28numbers, it was arguably a rational bargain. The problem is that this isn't that war. When you
14:34have scores of drones hovering right above the tank in one of the most surveilled front lines in history,
14:39that failure mode suddenly went from an occasional hit to a deliberate target. Now, the second layer of
14:44failure has nothing to do with the tanks and everything to do with how Russia used them. The clearest case
14:50study here is the opening drive on Kyiv. Russia sent long armored columns racing down predictable
14:56highways toward the capital, and those columns were chronically short of fuel, and more importantly,
15:01infantry. A tank, for all its armor and firepower, is effectively blind and deaf at close range. It has
15:08terrible visibility, especially to its sides and rear, and in forests, towns and villages, it's desperately
15:14vulnerable to anyone who can get close. The job of screening infantry is to find and flush out ambushes
15:20before they spring. The Modern War Institute drew the comparison with the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
15:26Just as Egyptian and Syrian infantry teams with wire-guided Sager missiles devastated unsupported
15:32Israeli tanks in 1973, small hidden teams of Ukrainian light infantry, armed with modern anti-tank missiles
15:39and drones, picked apart Russian columns that had no business advancing the way they did. The columns were
15:45forced onto roads because the surrounding terrain had become muddy and difficult to traverse, and this
15:50was dramatically illustrated by images of the infamous 35-mile-long convoy north of Kyiv. They bunched up
15:56into traffic jams, and then, because Russia didn't actually prepare for a drawn-out war, they ran out of
16:02fuel. It was a lesson in hubris, brought by the image of a 35-mile-long convoy of surrounded tanks.
16:08The third layer is the weapons. If you followed the early war, the tanks were stopped by the American
16:14Javelin and the British Endlaw, shoulder-fired missiles that became viral symbols of Ukrainian
16:19resistance. Ukraine also fielded its own laser-guided Stugner P, but by 2025, some Ukrainian and
16:27independent assessments of drones credited them with roughly 65% of Russian tank losses. And that word
16:33drones is where the entire story hinges. According to Ukraine's own National Security and Defense
16:39Council, the country's defense industry reached the capacity to produce more than 8 million FPV drones
16:45a year by 2026, across more than 160 companies, ranging from large factories to garage startups.
16:52While this is a Ukrainian source, whatever the precise production figure, the order of magnitude means
16:58the front line is now saturated permanently, with cheap flying bombs hunting anything that moves.
17:03And the implication for tanks is brutal. A tank no longer has to worry only about the ambush team
17:09it might stumble into. It has to worry about the sky, constantly, for every meter of every advance
17:14across the entire 1,100 kilometers of the front line. Russia and Ukraine both tried to fight back
17:20against the drones, of course, which resulted in some hilarious designs. The first countermeasure was
17:26electronic warfare, jammers that sever the radio link between the FPV drone and its pilot, sending it
17:32tumbling harmlessly to the ground. For a while, that worked until the drone makers started using
17:37fiber optics. Instead of a radio signal, these drones trailed an impossibly thin cable behind them,
17:43unspooling as they fly, which physically connected the drone to its pilot. Russia reportedly fielded these
17:50first in the spring of 2024, and Ukraine rapidly matched them. The cable soon littered the battlefield,
17:56becoming tangled in vegetation, infrastructure, and even bird nests. But despite that, the resulting fiber optics
18:03industry exploded, where reportedly China increased the prices between 250 and 400 percent in 2026. With
18:11electronic defenses failing, Russia turned to physical armor. It started in 2022 with what soldiers mockingly
18:18call cope cages, simple metal slat structures welded over the turret to catch grenades dropped by small drones.
18:24In early April 2024, turtle tanks emerged on the battlefield of the Russo-Ukrainian war,
18:31entire vehicles encased in welded sheet metal shells, so that the tank disappeared inside a
18:36crude metal box with just a gun poking out. In 2024, the Russians added hundreds of thick metal spines to
18:43these shells, betting that the resulting porcupine tanks would snag and detonate drones before they
18:48reached the hull. And by 2025, the spines had evolved into thousands of fine metal hairs,
18:54made from unwound aluminum cable draped over the vehicle like a shaggy coat. Some observers described
19:00them as hedgehogs, and they were among the most heavily protected seen during the war, capable of eating
19:05a dozen FPV drones before finally being knocked out. But they were still being knocked out.
19:10So what's the plan? What does Russia actually intend to do with this enormous horde of armor it can't
19:16deploy? The honest answer is that nobody outside the Kremlin knows for certain. The most likely
19:22explanation is that Russia is playing a long game. The thinking goes that Russian commanders are betting
19:28that some new counter-drone technology will emerge. A breakthrough in jamming, in interceptors,
19:33in directed energy, something that reopens the battlefield to fast, mobile, mechanized warfare.
19:38And in the meantime, they're preserving and rebuilding their armored core, keeping it intact and ready
19:44for that future moment when tanks can rule again. The darker, more immediate possibility is simpler.
19:50It suggests that Russian commanders, under pressure to deliver results, may simply get desperate enough
19:56to throw the tanks back into the fire, regardless of the consequences. And in that scenario, the vast
20:01rebuilt fleet is simply a reserve of expendable steel, fed into the battlefield to buy ground at a terrible rate
20:08of
20:08exchange. Remember, after 2022, Russia's advancement stalled to the point where, between 2023 and 2025,
20:16it occupied only about 1.23% of Ukraine's territory. And there is one final twist. The rebuilt fleet,
20:24for all its impressive size, is fundamentally a one-time boost. Russia dipped into the vast Soviet
20:29stockpile, and that stockpile is now nearly empty. A June 2026 satellite analysis by open-source
20:36analyst John Peay revealed that while Russia started with a pre-war stockpile of 7,342 tanks,
20:43only 2,088 remain in storage, and of those, just 851 are viable for restoration. The remaining 1,237
20:51tanks are effectively dead inventory. So Russia has drained something like 72% of its entire Cold War tank
20:59reserve. At this point, if losses continue at roughly 90 tanks per month, it will take another
21:04nine months or so before the stock is fully out. And when that happens, there's no more waves of
21:09Soviet armor to use, and what Russia has will be based solely on what it can produce. And Russia's
21:16running out of more than just tanks, as the dominance of artillery on the battlefield is slowly
21:21being eroded. To learn more, check out this video, and make sure to subscribe to The Military Show for daily
21:27news.
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