Videos show these main battle tanks being transported by train from the Russian Far East to the west of the country. These tanks were designed at the end of World War II.
By Mayeul Aldebert
Published on 03/23/2023 at 12:55 PM, updated on 03/23/2023 at 1:25 PM
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Soviet T-54 tanks transported from the Russian Far East. screenshot
Russia definitely continues to scratch the bottoms of drawers. The Russian military is said to have dug up their old T-54 tanks as well as their upgraded version of the T-55 designed at the end of WWII. Indeed, several experts and observers have pointed out, with supporting videos and not without surprise, that these ancestors were transported by train from the Russian Far East to the west of the country.
With around 100,000 units in service, the T-54 and T-55 are among the most-produced tanks in military history. In service from 1948 in the Soviet Army and then in the armies of members of the Warsaw Pact, they were also exported by the USSR in the 1950s and were manufactured in Poland and Czechoslovakia until 1983. These are the direct descendants of the emblematic T-34, which the Soviet Army was armed with during the Great Patriotic War against the armored personnel carriers of Nazi Germany.
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“I call him ‘Survivor’ because you can still find him in many theaters of war, in Ethiopia, in Yemen, in Syria,” reports tank specialist Marc Chassillan. The T-54 has the particularity of resisting the ravages of time due to its great simplicity of design and use. “There are no electronics on board, everything is purely visual, that’s country mechanics from the 1950s,” explains Marc Chassillan. “It’s also a tank that you can maneuver after a day of training, and that’s why you find it in many resistance or guerrilla movements: it was Commander Massoud’s favorite tank.” And the T-54 can also boast of high reliability, since maintenance does not require much expertise or spare parts.
A massacre of a Leclerc
With its rifled 100mm gun, top speed of 51km/h and its 36 tons, the T-54 is still a completely different generation than the Western Leopard 2 or M1 Abrams awaited in Ukraine, and that’s the least of it you can say . These last tanks of the NATO armies were designed to be technically superior to the Soviet T-72 and T-80, which themselves predate the ancestral T-54 by two generations.
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Commander Massoud’s two damaged T-55 tanks near Kabul in October 1996. TERENCE WHITE
Despite their dilapidated state, will the T-54s be of any use to Russian forces in Ukraine? “Faced with a Leclerc or an American M1, it would be a massacre,” confirms Marc Chassillan. “But it can be used as a mobile infantry support gun, for indirect fire it adds tubes they say.” The T-54 could also be used as a kind of mobile blockhouse from a defensive point of view. Camouflaged and buried with only the turret sticking out, the T-54 can expertly defend a position.
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“But unlike the Slovenian M-55, an ultra-modernized version of the T-55 that was delivered to Ukraine, the T-54 does not have a night fire system and thermal imaging cameras, which is a very big disadvantage,” added Marc Chassillon .
Sold out
Having lost at least 1900 tanks since the invasion of Ukraine began, according to a count by reputable blog Oryx, Russia had already dusted off its emblematic T-62s, which we knew were being set aside for the Russian Army’s official reserves. Is the big return of the T-54 this time a sign of real depletion of Russian stocks? “In any case, Russian losses far exceed the fleet’s renewal capacity, which before the war was estimated at 300 new tanks and 300 old modernized tanks per year,” explains Marc Chassillan. And if Russia has opened new workshops, it is difficult to know exactly their capacity. With its state-of-the-art T-90M being sent to Ukraine, the Kremlin is playing on all fronts anyway.
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An exceptionally reconstituted company of T-34s during a parade in Red Square marking the 75th anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany. Alexander NEMENOV / AFP
However, the defense sector is proving unable to set in motion a production chain capable of replacing its most modern tanks with roughly equivalent units. “The Russian defense industry did not produce any of the much-anticipated T-14 Armata, but instead began introducing hundreds of refurbished or upgraded variants such as obsolete T-62s or even T-54s from the 1950s in an unaltered state,” analyzes for his part Oryx in a note titled Father’s Army: List of Equipment of the Russian Army Stationed in Ukraine, Older Than Our Parents.
Therefore, in addition to main battle tanks, there are other post-war armored vehicles, such as the BTR-50 tracked vehicles, the presence of which in Ukraine was recently confirmed by analysts. Russia lost at least 10,000 armored vehicles in a year of war, so it does not shy away from digging up its historical equipment. Will the Russian army go so far as to find iconic T-34s or maybe even small T-26s from the 1930s? “These models had their heyday in their time, but today there are more,” says Marc Chassillan. In 2019, Moscow had managed to recover around thirty T-34s from Laos to parade in Red Square to mark the 75th anniversary of the 1945 victory.