Russia has already run out of its best T-90M, T-80BVM and T-72B3 tanks. Then it turned to their 50- and 60-year-old T-80Bs and T-62Ms. Even a few modern T-14 tanks showed up in Ukraine, but Russian forces rejected them because they keep breaking down. So now Russia is left looking at ways that only a few months were unthinkable and a bit of a joke, dusting off tanks from the 1950s.
And they’re not entirely useless either, especially so if you’re Russian and manpower losses aren’t even a consideration.
“The earliest T-54 series tanks were adopted by the Soviet Army back in the mid-to-late 1940s, and the T-55 series entered service in 1958. Even an outdated tank is more useful than no tank at all, but we consider the lack of rangefinders and ballistic computers (not to mention fire control systems) to be the key disadvantages of these series, as well as primitive sights and (in T-54s) an inferior gun stabilization system.” – CIT reports.
Source: Vice
Russia appears to be deploying 75-year-old tanks to Ukraine.
According to Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT), an open source intelligence group based in the country of Georgia, the Kremlin has started pulling T-54 and T-55 tanks from a storage base in the far east of Russia. The T-54 and T-55 tanks were built starting in the late 1940s and the Soviet Union built a lot of them. The USSR manufactured more than 100,000 of the tanks in the decade after the war, making it the most widely produced tank in the world.
CIT found photos on VK, a Russian social media site, from people near the base that showed the tanks had been pulled from storage. They also found photographs of the tanks being placed on trains for shipment. After CIT published its investigation, footage of the T-54s moving by train appeared online.
A few months ago the Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT) joked that they didn’t expect to see any T-54/T-55 go into action even with Russia’s staggering losses.
