Russia’s vast stocks of Soviet-era weaponry are running out

It may have to scale back its offensive in Ukraine.

By Pavel Luzin, Visiting Scholar of the Russia and Eurasia Program at The Fletcher School

For a long time it seemed that a war of attrition between Ukraine and a Russia with five times its population could end only one way. But the much-vaunted Russian offensive against Kharkiv in the north that started in May is fizzling out. Its advances elsewhere along the line, especially in the Donbas region, have been both strategically trivial and achieved only at huge cost. The question now is less whether Ukraine can stay in the fight and more how long can Russia keep up its current tempo of operations.

The key issue is not manpower. Russia seems able to go on finding another 25,000 or so soldiers each month to retain around 470,000 men at the front, although it is having to pay more for them. Production of missiles to strike Ukrainian infrastructure is also surging. But for all the talk of Russia having become a war economy, with some 8% of its gdp devoted to military spending, it is able to replace its staggering losses of tanks, armoured infantry vehicles and artillery only by drawing out of storage and refurbishing stocks built up in the Soviet era. Huge though these stocks are, they are not infinite.

According to most intelligence estimates, after the first two years of the war Russia had lost about 3,000 tanks and 5,000 other armoured vehicles. Oryx, a Dutch open-source intelligence site, puts the number of Russian tank losses for which it has either photo or videographic evidence at 3,235, but suggests the actual number is “significantly higher”.

Aleksandr Golts, an analyst at the Stockholm Centre for Eastern European Studies, says that Vladimir Putin has the old politburo to thank for the huge stockpiles of weapons that were built up during the cold war. He says that Soviet leaders knew that Western military kit was much more advanced than their own, so they opted for mass, churning out thousands of armoured vehicles in peacetime in case of war. Before the Soviet Union’s demise, says Mr Golts, it had as many armoured vehicles as the rest of the world put together.

When the then defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, boasted in December 2023 that 1,530 tanks had been delivered in the course of the year, he omitted to say that nearly 85% of them, according to an assessment by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a London think-tank, were not new tanks but old ones (mainly t-72s, also t-62s and even some t-55s dating from just after the second world war) that had been taken out of storage and given a wash and brush-up.

Since the invasion, about 175 reasonably modern t-90m tanks have been sent to the front line. The iissestimates that annual production this year could be approaching 90. However, Michael Gjerstad, an analyst with the iiss, argues that most of the t-90ms are actually upgrades of older t-90as. As those numbers dwindle, production of newly built t-90ms this year might be no more than 28. Pavel Luzin, an expert on Russian military capacity at the Washington-based Centre for European Policy Analysis, reckons that Russia can build only 30 brand-new tanks a year. When the Ukrainians captured a supposedly new t-90m last year, they found that its gun had been made in 1992.

Mr Luzin reckons that Russia’s ability to build new tanks or infantry fighting vehicles, or even to refurbish old ones, is hampered by the difficulty of getting components. Stores of components for tank production that before the war were intended for use in 2025 have already been raided, while crucial equipment, such as fuel-heaters for diesel engines, high-voltage electrical systems and infrared thermal imaging to identify targets, were all previously imported from Europe; their sale is now blocked by sanctions. The lack of high-quality ball-bearings is also a constraint. Chinese alternatives are sometimes available, but are said not to meet former quality standards.

Those are not the only problems when it comes to building new armoured vehicles or trying to modernise old ones. Ferroalloy production has actually decreased in the past two years, says Mr Luzin. Most welding in the weapons factories is still done by hand, and despite factories supposedly working triple shifts, Mr Luzin says that the firms are struggling to recruit enough workers. They also largely depend on machine tools imported years ago from Germany and Sweden, many of which are now old and hard to maintain.

Moreover, the old Soviet armaments supply chain no longer exists. Ukraine, Georgia and East Germany were all important centres of Soviet weapons and components manufacture. Ironically, Kharkiv was the main producer of turrets for t-72 tanks. The number of workers in Russia’s military-industrial complex has also fallen dramatically, says Mr Luzin, from about 10m to 2m, without any offsetting step-change in automation.

Another concern is artillery-barrel production. For now, with the help of North Korea, Russia appears to have enough shells, probably about 3m this year—sufficient to outgun the Ukrainians until recently by at least 5:1 and in some places by much more. But the drawback of such high rates of fire has been the wear and tear on barrels. In some highly contested areas, the barrels of howitzers need replacing after only a few months.

Over a barrel

Yet, says Mr Luzin, there are only two factories that have the sophisticated Austrian-made rotary forging machines (the last one was imported in 2017) needed to make the barrels. Each can produce only around 100 barrels a year, compared with the thousands needed. Russia has never made its own forging machines; it imported them from America in the 1930s and looted them from Germany after the war.

The solution has been to cannibalise barrels from old towed artillery and fit them to self-propelled howitzers. Richard Vereker, an open-source analyst, thinks that by the start of this year about 4,800 barrels had been swapped out. How long the Russians can carry on doing this depends on the condition of the 7,000 or so that may be left. Mr Gjerstad says that with multi-launch rocket systems, such as the tos-1a, eking out barrel life has already meant much shorter bursts of fire.

But the biggest emerging problem is with tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, which are still crucial to any offensive ground operations at scale. Although the iiss estimated that in February this year Russia may have had about 3,200 tanks in storage to draw on, Mr Gjerstad says up to 70% of them “have not moved an inch since the beginning of the war”. A large proportion of the t-72s have been stored uncovered since the early 1990s and are probably in very poor condition.

Both Mr Golts and Mr Luzin reckon that at current rates of attrition Russian tank and infantry-vehicle refurbishment from storage will have reached a “critical point of exhaustion” by the second half of next year. Mr Gjerstad gives it a few months longer. But the Russians will not want to reach a cliff-edge when they suddenly have only very few new tanks to send to the front. The new defence minister, Andrei Belousov, appears to be focused on ramping up production of drones.

Unless something changes, before the end of this year, Russian forces may have to adjust their posture to one that is much more defensive, says Mr Gjerstad. It could even become apparent before the end of summer. Mr Putin’s interest in a temporary ceasefire may soon increase. 

(This post is republished from The Economist.)