As the Vedomosti newspaper reported in the material by Alexey Nikolsky and Ilya Lakstygal, "The Armed Forces will receive 1,500 tanks in 2023. This number will also include upgraded vehicles removed from storage," Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council Dmitry Medvedev became the first head since the beginning of the Russian special military operation in Ukraine to name the annual production of one of the main types of combat platforms actively used in military operations - main battle tanks.
The T-90M tank produced in 2023 by JSC Uralvagonzavod at factory tests. Side screens removed (from) "Uralvagonzavod RPC JSC" "Our enemies thought that our industry would choke, i.e. we would spend everything, - that's their endless conversations.
"Shells have run out, tanks have run out, rockets have run out," etc. We will make 1,500 tanks this year," Dmitry Medvedev said in an interview with Russian news agencies and users of the VK social network. "The military-industrial complex has been fired up, it is working actively, most enterprises (I am talking about this firsthand, but because I travel around them) work in three shifts, work, as they say, from wheels - they directly give everything to the troops, produce the most modern Russian types of weapons, and even in a situation when they really try to deprive of components, cut off oxygen in certain areas," Medvedev said. The new T-90M tank, according to Medvedev, "is the best tank in the world and surpasses the Western Leopard, Challenger and Abrams (transferred to Ukraine. - "Vedomosti").
Dmitry Kornev, editor of the Military Russia portal, believes that it is unlikely that we are talking about 1,500 new tanks. Most likely, a significant part will consist of modernized Soviet cars removed from storage and equipped with new means of communication, dynamic protection, electronics, etc., Kornev suggests.
According to a source close to the Ministry of Defense, several hundred new T-90M and T-14 tanks are indeed planned to be produced, and most of the rest will be upgraded T-72 and T-80 tanks taken from military equipment storage bases. A number of older T-62 tanks will also be upgraded. In the autumn of 2022, visiting the 103rd armored repair plant in Chita, State Duma deputy Andrei Gurulev said that the company has a contract for the modernization of 400 T-62. In the 80s, Soviet factories produced more than 2,000 new tanks a year. Only Uralvagonzavod (UVZ) in 1985, at its peak, according to the book "T-72/T-90. The experience of creating domestic main battle tanks", produced 1,559 T-72 tanks. In the post-Soviet period, the maximum rate of production of T-90 tanks was reached in the 2000s due to export supplies to India and Algeria and amounted to about 200-300 vehicles per year, while UVZ was then the largest manufacturer of new tanks in the world.
According to Viktor Murakhovsky, editor-in-chief of the Arsenal of the Fatherland magazine, it is necessary to increase the production of new T-90M tanks and the relevant decisions have obviously been made. These tanks will be able to effectively resist such strong Western tanks as the German Leopard 2A6, the British Challenger 2 and the American Abrams, which are planned to be delivered to the APU this year.
Apparently, the total volume of production of new tanks for the Russian Armed Forces in 2023 will be adequate to the announced deliveries to Ukraine of Western third-generation tanks, such as Leopard 2, Challenger 2 and Abrams, believes Mikhail Barabanov, an expert at the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies.
From the bmpd side, we will point out that the data that the notorious "1500 tanks" will be mostly cars of non-new production was actually confirmed by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who in an interview with Russian television on March 25 said: "[Western] arsonists plan to send 420-440 tanks to Ukraine. During this time, we will produce new and upgrade existing ones over 1600. The total number of tanks of the Russian Federation will exceed three times the number of tanks in the APU. Even more than three times."