- Last year, Russian industry fetched around 1,000 50-year-old T-72A tanks from long-term storage
- Now the upgraded T-72As have begun to reach front-line regiments
- The upgraded T-72AM is still a pretty flimsy tank, so don't expect its arrival to make much of a difference
Back in September, the Kremlin began pulling as many as 1,000 1970s-vintage T-72A tanks out of long-term storage and preparing them for modernization. This week, we caught our first glimpse of these very old, but freshly upgraded, Russian tanks in active service. Meet the T-72AM.
Their appearance is significant for two reasons. It's evidence Russia is now digging deep enough into Soviet-era storage to bring 50-year-old tanks to the front. And it's a test of whether tanks that old, with armor that thin, can survive a battlefield that already kills the new ones.
Video of the 46-ton, three-person T-72AM in service with the 1442nd Guards Motor Rifle Regiment recently appeared online. The 1442nd Guards Motor Rifle Regiment is deployed just east of the city of Kostiantynivka in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk Oblast.
Kostiantynivka is arguably the main focus of Russia's spring offensive. To march on the free cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk from the south, the Russians may first need to advance through Kostiantynivka.
That offensive is off to a very slow start, likely owing to escalating Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian supply lines that are weakening front-line regiments before they can even begin an assault. If and when the Russians finally gain momentum, achieve some kind of breakthrough and once again deploy large numbers of armored vehicles for a push toward Kostiantynivka, those T-72AMs could see their first combat.
If that happens, and that's a big "if," expect losses. The refurbished, enhanced T-72AM is still a 50-year-old tank in its bones. Yes, it's probably got new sensors and fire-controls. It also has many of the add-on protections the Russians have developed to help defend their tanks from the tiny explosive drones that are everywhere all the time over 1,200-km front line of Russia's 51-month wider war on Ukraine.
Added protection
These add-ons include explosive reactive armor, chains, rubber mats and a drone-blocking "cope cage" atop the turret. If the 1442nd Guards Motor Rifle Regiment does what most Russian regiments do, it'll eventually add additional protections, potentially including metal spines that block incoming drones.
The problem is the basic armor. The T-72A was one of the earliest mass-produced T-72s in Soviet service and sports thin armor compared to later models. The best-protected part of the turret, the frontal arc, is just 280 mm thick. The T-72B that followed the T-72A added armor to the turret, among other enhancements.
Trending Now
So the T-72A is a flimsier tank than newer T-72 models including the latest T-72B3M. But that may not matter very much on a battlefield where even the best-protected tanks are extremely vulnerable to the twin threat of buried mines exploding underneath them and explosive drones barreling down from above.
It's not for no reason that Russian forces have largely parked their surviving armored fighting vehicles after losing around 14,000 of them in Ukraine. These days Russian regiments tend to attack on foot, theorizing that small groups of infantry stand a better chance of avoiding drone surveillance as they infiltrate across the wide disputed gray zone.
The thousands of replacement tanks Russian industry has either built new since 2022 or fetched from long-term storage have more than replaced the 4,400 tanks the Russians have lost in Ukraine. But that doesn't mean those replacement tanks are going to attack in large numbers anytime soon.
The gray zone is a kill zone for all armored vehicles, whether they're brand new or 50 years old.
