I’ve read that soldiers can burn up to 6,000 calories a day in freezing winter climate. I have doubts Russia can or would supply that much nutrition to these conscripts on the front lines in December.
I think the purpose of these conscripts is basically to be casus belli for Russia to send more missiles to Ukraine and/or nuke Kiev. They are expendable puppets as far as Putin is concerned. They will be parked in the “new Russia territories” and will sit there until they freeze, starve or are killed. That’s their purpose.
They almost certainly were in service in front line units. Just looking at the dates that the first 5 T-64BV losses were photographed, they were photographed on March 14th, 15th and 16th (x2) and 17th. It’s highly doubtful that they were pulled from deep storage; they were almost certainly in front line units. And just to note again, the T-64 was the standard frontline MBT of the Ukrainian Army at the start of the invasion, and even with the influx of T-72s and variants from NATO sources, it’s likely still the most common Ukrainian MBT. It’s certainly by far the most common identified recorded tank lost by Ukraine, making up 180 of 270 recorded Ukrainian tanks lost or 66.6%, or ignoring the 25 unidentified models of Ukrainian tanks lost 73.4%. Maintaining a T-64 is no harder than a T-72, or a T-80, or a T-90, and their presence in Russian losses doesn’t indicate that they were pulled from deep storage but rather that they were still in limited from-line service in Russia and pre-war sources were in error in not noting this. The fact that the last T-64s were manufactured in the Soviet era hasn’t prevented the Ukraine from maintaining and upgrading their fleet of them.
I can understand the reluctance too, but it’s been clear for some time now that this war wasn’t going to be over in a month or two so the need for conversion training and logistical issues has kind of long gone out the window since training and logistical setups for NATO artillery, self-propelled artillery, HIMARS, NASAMS, MLRS, Gepard SPAA and other systems has been handled; integrating the HARM anti-radiation missile with the Su-27 has even been handled. NATO has been handing over their own MBTs of Soviet origin, the only remaining excuse for not handing over NATO tanks of NATO design, even the elderly Leopard Is that were briefly considered is political fear that it will be viewed as escalatory. Ukraine is going to need those tanks eventually; the supply of Soviet-era MBTs in NATO stocks to provide to Ukraine is reaching the point of exhaustion. The sooner the decision to provide modern NATO MBTs is made, the sooner the training and logistical hurdles will be overcome.
A couple of weeks ago it was looking like Olaf Scholz was under enough pressure from the Bundestag to provide Leopard 2s whether he liked it or not, but that fell through.
It’s going to be very ugly. The mobilized soldiers are going to not want to be there for more reasons than might immediately be obvious. People arrested for protesting the mobilization have been given mobilization orders as punishment:
Police detained the protesters across 38 cities in Russia on Wednesday, according to figures released shortly after midnight by independent monitoring group OVD-Info. The group’s spokeswoman Maria Kuznetsova told CNN by phone that at at least four police stations in Moscow, some of the protesters arrested by riot police were being drafted directly into Russia’s military.
And much like I feared, it looks like Ukrainians in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia Oblasts are going to be drafted to fight their own countrymen once Russia illegally annexes them, the same as has happened in the LDR and DPR. Ukrainians told to be ready to fight for Russia.
Ukraine’s progress in the southern regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia has been far more limited than its successes in the north-east. Front line positions come under regular fire as both Russia and Ukraine attempt to push forward. The BBC’s Abdujalil Abdurasulov gained rare access to the front line in Kherson, a region where Ukrainian men have been told they could be drafted to fight for the Russian army.
I have no idea how true it is, but I read a theory that these new recruits are just going to be used to flush out Ukranian soldiers. Basically the Russians will take these untrained recruits and wait for Ukrainian soldiers to shoot at them, so that the Russians know where to target their artillery. No idea if thats the actual plan or not, we will see I guess.
I met a British officer who remarked that the Serbian army used a similar tactic against the Kosovans during the wars following the collapse of Yugoslavia.
It sounds like a long established military tactic to put expendable unit out in the open to draw fire from the enemy.
Obviously, you would not want to sacrifice your best troops on such a role.
If everyone knows this, why not lie low and let the cannon fodder pass, then attack the real soldiers? The untrained conscripts probably wouldn’t be a problem.
Again, I’m not a soldier and I have no experience of war but the downsides of that, that I could hypothesize are 1) having a lot of enemy soldiers - incompetent or not - in your midst is going to prove problematic, 2) you lose the psychological part of the war by keeping the war losses for the enemy side low, 3) you end up having a giant army of POWs that you have to care for, sapping resources from the front lines.
However, due to corruption, low maintenance budgets and incompetence, how much is still usable? There were reports of stuff having been stripped of anything portable and valuable on the black market.
Exactly.
The problem with raw numbers like these is that the reality is often quite different.
It is within the realms of possibility that Russia , at the end of this- gets to keep some Ukraine territory- and thus “wins”. The possibility that Russia conquers all of Ukraine is approaching zero.
Yep.
Yeah. Giving guns to the dudes you hate you is such a good idea. I suspect fragging on a scale never before seen, not to mention whole units changing sides.
Yes, but this isn’t a question of scrapping a T-64. It could go into storage and you could bring an easier to maintain T-72 out - if they actually do have thousands they can easily make ready. They all served basically the same role and had the same capabilities. There wasn’t any good reason for The USSR to have three tanks that filled the same role. As far as I can tell, the only reason they ended up with them was inertia or corruption.
Yeah, but my question is why this tank is in front line service if they actually do have a bunch of T-72s ready to be used.
That’s not much of a reason for Russia to use them. Ukraine used them because it’s what they had. Russia has thousands of T-72s in storage.
I’m not sure it’s true that there’s no difference in maintaining the T-64. My understanding is that the 5TDF used in the T-64 is comparatively unreliable, and the T-64 did cost more to maintain.
Well, it’s costly. Replacing a tank is expensive. If a unit is equipped with functioning T-64s, why replace them if you don’t have a good reason? Yes, you could have T-72s over her and T-64s over there, but if a given tank division presently has T-64s, switching them out with different tanks is a pain - and remember, they didn’t think this war would last very long. Few people did.
At any given time, it’s common for a military to have a lot of different kinds of equipment, for a variety of reasons.
In the U.S., they give the old stuff to the Marines. 
I think there is still a strong pro-Russia element in those areas. A motivated and violent minority can make things very difficult for a government
Seems like you just call in artillery on unsupported foot infantry and sit tight.
Because it’s a perfectly functional MBT and the T-72 isn’t necessarily a superior vehicle. Again, as built the T-64 was the more effective but costlier older brother of the T-72.
You’re right, but that’s just how the Soviets did things. There was no real reason to have 2 different nuclear attack submarines in serial production at the same time, but that’s what they did with the Akula and Sierra. There’s really only two design lines of MBTs that the Soviets and now Russia use, not three. The T-64 evolved into the T-80 and the T-72 evolved into the T-90. The lead designer of the T-90 is actually on record as saying putting it into production was a mistake.
Regarding the ages of Russian MBTs, and MBTs in general, when the USSR collapsed production of MBTs in the Former Soviet Republics dropped to minimal levels and hasn’t gotten very high since. Russian tank production was at best 250 a year since the turn of the century. Most of the tanks in Russian service were built by the USSR during the Cold War. The last T-80 built on a Russian production line was in 2001, and of the ~5,400 produced including the T-80UDs still being built in Ukraine up until the invasion
In 1991, when the Soviet Union was breaking up, the Soviet Army operated 4,839 T-80 MBTs of several different models.
So almost all of the T-80s now being used by Russia date back to pre-1991. This is pretty common the world over, almost everyone cut back production of MBTs dramatically when the Cold War ended as there were more than enough in stocks to meet any foreseeable needs now that there was no Cold War threat. One of the primary motivations in keeping the M1 and Leopard 2- and the T-72 and T-90 - in very low-level yearly production after the fall of the Soviet Union was that if the factories were fully closed, it could potentially take years to restart them from scratch should the need suddenly arise. Even the latest model T-72, the T-72B3M model 2016 weren’t actually built in 2016, older T-72s were rebuilt into them starting from 2016.
Regarding the whole issue of Russian tanks and other heavy equipment in storage, here’s an interesting video by someone who actually went about counting the numbers of tanks in satellite photos of Russian storage depots both prior to the war and currently. Make of his estimations what you will (I don’t totally agree with them), they are estimations, but he explains how he came to them; he gives Russia one and a half years at the current rate of tank losses before it runs out of usable tanks in storage, and three years before its completely out of tanks. Thier losses have hurt, and they aren’t going to be able to sustain them forever, but the idea that Russia has no tanks or heavy equipment for the troops that it is mobilizing is just not the case.
having them is one thing, having them where you need them at the time you need them is a whole different kettle of fish (akin to: I know I have 2 brown socks, but I consistently only find one - b/c they are not at the place where I need them)
And yet they have been pulling hundreds of tanks from storage and sending them to the front lines over the past 7 months, as can be visibly seen in satellite photos.
I agree, it is an interesting video. Like yourself, I don’t totally agree with his estimations. But he did at least invest in the raw counts and tried to discern tanks from other vehicles.
My main problem with his estimate is: if those tanks were all in good repair and ready to go, you’d just pluck them one after the other from the row. There are lots of rows where tanks are removed and several are left between the removed tanks. I assume they decided those weren’t even trying to get running at the time and move to a garage to be repaired. So it still raises a question as to how many they have in storage that are able to be easily returned to service and have an expectation to survive for very long.
That might be true, when “low-quality enemy soldiers” means the poorly trained newbies who are nonetheless loyal to their side. But I imagine that the calculation changes when the “enemy” soldiers are actually opposed to the enemy, and in some cases even your own soldiers.
Yeah, I am not quite buying his conclusion, for a couple reasons.
- He takes the Oryx-reported tank loss numbers as the total loss rate. This is problematic as Oryx only reports losses that can be confirmed by open source photo or video evidence. While Oryx will have some “overcounts” of the same vehicle photographed in different contexts, it would be astonishing if they didn’t have significantly more “undercounts” of lost vehicles which simply haven’t been documented. I realize this war is playing out on social media, but it seems insane to just accept that every lost Russian tank has shown up in a video on someone’s Telegram feed. Russia’s loss rate is likely non-trivially higher than the Oryx numbers he accepts without discussion.
- He finds ~700-800 tanks removed from storage and says “that’s not too far off from the 1200 tanks they’ve lost.” But in fact it’s 2/3 at best of the tanks they’ve lost, so accepting his numbers Russia is already fielding almost 500 fewer tanks than they were at the beginning of the war, plus however many additional non-Oryx-documented losses the Russians have suffered. Even if that’s a paltry 20% undocumented losses, the Russians are down a quarter of their operational tank force in half a year. To maintain numbers on the front line they can pull from units not deployed in Ukraine, but they’ve apparently already stripped a lot of those and they can’t afford to completely denude their other frontiers of defense especially if they intend to escalate things in ways that could conceivable draw NATO into the conflict. Unless they want those jokes about the Poles trying to beat the Finns to taking St. Petersburg to become a reality.
- Nearly all stored tanks will need some repairs to be operational, even if it’s just minor replace cracked hoses type stuff. This, presumably, is why they haven’t made good their losses to date. There’s some rate at which they can bring stored tanks back into service, and their losses are exceeding that rate. Two further issues arise pursuant to this. First, they will be working through the stored tanks in descending order of ease of repair. Unless they allocate steadily increasing repair resources to this task, we should expect the rate of tanks being made operational to decrease. Second, they will be working through the stored tanks in descending order of capability, with the most modernized stored tanks being restored first. This means we would expect the tactical effectiveness of restored tanks to decline as time progresses.
While they aren’t going to run out of tanks completely in the foreseeable future, they are very likely very close to being unable to sustain the current numbers of tanks fielded in Ukraine, because their current rate of loss is likely notably higher than the rate at which they can bring stored tanks back into service, and they’ve probably stripped out-of-theatre units of almost all the hardware they dare. This will only be made worse if they start fielding them with newly-mobilized crews that struggle just to drive to where they’re supposed to go.