As Tank Losses Top 2,000, Russia Is Deploying Museum-Grade T-72s From 1974

Russian forces in Ukraine have lost around five tanks, on average, every day for more than 460 days since Russia widened its war on the country.

That’s a lot of tanks. The analysts at Oryx, a collective that tallies wartime equipment losses by scrutinizing photos and videos on social media, have counted no fewer than 2,003 destroyed, damaged and captured Russian tanks. And since some tank losses leave no photographic evidence, Oryx’s count almost definitely is an undercount.

Russia has written off probably around two-thirds of the roughly 3,500 tanks it had in active service before the wider war. Russia’s two main tank plants meanwhile are struggling to build more than a couple dozen new tanks a month, owing in part to a shortage of high-tech components that’s exacerbated by foreign sanctions.

High losses and low production help to explain why most of Russia’s replacement tanks are old tanks that technicians pulled out of open storage, lightly refurbished and sent to the front with few or no major upgrades. A survey of reequipped Russian regiments is like a tour of a tank museum. There are 1978-vintage T-80s, T-62s from the mid-1960s and even T-55s from the late 1950s.

The latest Russian museum tank to roll into combat is the T-72 Ural, the original model of the tank type that has been standard across the Russian and allied armies for five decades. The Uralvagonzavod factory in central Russia manufactured Urals for just a few years before switching to improved T-72 models in the late 1970s.

A 1974-vintage T-72 Ural might look a lot like a T-72B3 from 2023. But on the inside, it’s a totally different—and much cruder—vehicle. One that’s only marginally better than a T-55, and actually inferior to many T-62 models.

It’s unclear how many Urals Uralvagonzavod produced, how many are in storage and how many of those are recoverable. There might be a thousand old Urals lying around, but it’s possible just a few hundred are intact after five decades of hot-cold, wet-dry cycles.

Three-person, 46-ton T-72 Urals started showing up in Ukraine no later than February, around the first anniversary of Russia’s wider invasion. A Ural isn’t hard to spot if you know what to look for. Its biggest giveaways also are its biggest weaknesses. Both are related to the tank’s fire-controls.

Look for two things: a pair of large infrared spotlights on the right side of the turret and a small aperture for an optical rangefinder, also on the turret’s right. The infrared spotlights are how the commander and gunner spot targets at night for their tank’s auto-loaded 125-millimeter main gun.

Infrared spotlights became obsolete in the 1970s as passive methods of night vision—infrared and light-amplification—replaced active night vision. The problem with spotlit night vision is that anyone with infrared sights, including the enemy, can see the beam of an infrared spotlight and where it originates. With passive night vision, a tank crew can see at night without giving away its presence.

That a T-72 Ural crew must broadcast its location in order to fight at night basically means it can’t fight at night. It would be suicide on a battlefield teeming with Ukrainian tanks and fighting vehicles whose crews see through the latest infrared sights.

Daylight solves the Ural’s spotlight problem, but doesn’t mitigate the tank’s other major fire-control flaw: its optical rangefinder.

Such rangefinders have been around for at least a century. They work like binoculars—or even human eyes when a person is good at guessing distances. The viewer has a left and right image and knows how far away the separate images should overlap.

Optical rangefinders are inaccurate compared to modern laser rangefinders, which shoot a laser at a target and calculate the range by counting how long the laser takes to bounce back. Where an optical rangefinder requires a certain amount of guesswork and labor, a laser rangefinder is automatic, highly accurate and nearly instantaneous.

A Ural crew in a long-range fight with a Ukrainian tank, fighting vehicle or missile crew is at a disadvantage. It might still be calculating the range to target when the first Ukrainian shell or missile impacts.

Direct fights involving tanks are rare in Ukraine, of course. Most tank losses result from drone, artillery and mine strikes. But the Ural with its mostly steel armor is highly vulnerable to those attacks, too. At its toughest spots, a Ural’s armor offers protection equivalent to just 400 millimeters of steel. That’s half the maximum protection that a Ukrainian Leopard 2A4 enjoys.

Lightly protected, blind at night and slow to calculate range, a T-72 Ural is next to useless in a serious fight on a modern battlefield. It might be a better tank than a 70-year-old T-55. But it’s not better than a T-62MV that went through a deep upgrade program in the 1980s. And we know how the T-62 has fared in Ukraine. (Spoiler: badly.)

Oryx so far has identified two knocked-out Urals. Expect more of the aged tanks to show up in tallies of vehicle losses as Ukrainian forces slowly shift from defense to offense—and bring more Russian tanks into their crosshairs.