I recently stumbled upon some photos on the internet of the supposed tank reserves of the Russian Army and I was a bit stunned. The war in Ukraine has certainly shown us just how undermaintained the military hardware of Russia is but these reserves are mind blowing.
First off, judging by what we can see in the photos these storage facilities are for T-62, T-55/54, BMP-1, and BRDM-2s mostly, however there are other models scattered throughout here. The facilities are located in the Far East, Siberia, and the military storage base in Buryatiya. I did try pinpointing some of the unknown locations more but at this point it doesn’t really matter. Although worth noting that the weather effects of the ones in Siberia haven’t really made them look much worse than the ones in other places.
It is important to also note that all of the tanks in these photos are missing something, whether it’s optics, lights, etc. This leads me to believe that Russia’s tank reserves are primarily essentially boneyards where they pick parts off these tanks to keep the regular fleet running. Which also makes sense as it would be ridiculously costly, both financially and in terms of manpower hours to keep all of these tanks in any sort of standby ready condition. We know from the tanks and other military equipment that has been used by Russia in the Ukraine war that not even those were maintained properly so it’s understandable these are in the condition they are.
Oddly enough, the base in Buryatiya had mostly T-62M and possibly what looks like T-72B3 tanks which were the same ones that Russia brought out of retirement for Vostok 2018, aka “East 2018”. This was a large scale Russian military operation held from September 11th to September 17th, of 2018. It involved units from the Army, Air Force, Navy, and both China and Mongolia participated. During this operation it was estimated some 36,000 pieces of military equipment, mostly tanks, were moved around. As such, Russia went to the Buryatiya military storage base and essentially picked out the best of T-62M and T-72B3 tanks they could find, brought them up to decent running condition and went with them. It is believed these units have already been sent to the frontlines in Ukraine. This operation demonstrated that Russia is capable of bringing these old stocks out and getting them into some sort of actionable service however it is highly doubtful this could be deployed on any large scale. Cool photos though!
Editors note: Some of the photos here were obtained from the Instagram account, Lanasator.
Ben
Worth noting the Ukraine bone yard in Kharkiv was much much worse and they brought many if not most back after 2014.