The cold and increasingly cold weather puts both Russian and Ukrainian troops to the test as the war now surpasses three years. Meanwhile, Russia has experienced a significant loss of its armored vehicles and the Kremlin is removing its last 2,500 tanks from long-term storage.
However, as published by the specialized media Moscow has encountered a problem: more than 600 of them are T-64. This is an older tank model that only a few Russian formations employ anymore, and all of them belong to former formations of Russia’s puppet “republics” in eastern Ukraine, which the Russian military absorbed in early 2023.
The specialized media points out that it is still “unclear whether the Russian army is willing to create the necessary infrastructure to support the approximately 642 40-ton T-64s” that are still in storage.decades after the military discarded them in favor of similar, but newer T-80s“.
“We should probably discard the remaining 642 T-64s,” concluded open source analyst Jompy following a recent analysis of Russian tank reserves. “Whatever is removed now, here and there, will most likely be scrapped or cannibalized for spare parts for the few former DL/PR forces (a reference to the armies of the Russian-backed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics in eastern Ukraine), still operating in Ukraine.”
Troops in those Ukrainian areas controlled by Russia, whose army assumed full command in early 2023, still retain the T-64s, which were built in Kharkov, in northeastern Ukraine, and which They remain the main tanks of the Ukrainian armed forcesalthough in much improved versions.
