Slowly but steadily, through pain and sweat, Ukraine’s defense industry is getting the nation’s 850-tank fleet repaired and renovated so that the armored vehicles could continue serving in the military’s ranks.
As recently as Feb. 24, the Kyiv-based Armored Vehicles Plant, one of the sector’s biggest old-timers that’s been in action since 1935, rolled out five repaired and modernized T-72 tanks.
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It took the plant two months — ahead of the usual schedule that’s often hamstrung by scarce financing — to ready the 45-ton machines to rejoin their home combat units across Ukraine.
“We have improved their technical performance,” said Volodymyr Syniavsky, director of the plant, during the presentation of the tanks on Feb. 24. “More powerful 840-horsepower engines have been installed along with more sophisticated caterpillar tracks taken from Т-80 tanks.”
Each jacked-up T-72 now carries the 125-millimeter Ukrainian-produced Kombat missile system, which is capable of killing hostile targets, usually vehicles or helicopters, within a 4 kilometer radius.
“We have also pumped up their vision equipment and installed fresh reactive armor shields of the Nozh system,” Syniavsky said.
According to Yuriy Husyev, director-general of Ukraine’s state-run defense production giant UkrOboronProm, the Kyiv factory is currently repairing five other T-72s.
According to Military Balance 2020, an annual databook issued by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, Ukraine currently operates nearly 100 T-72AV/B1 modification vehicles and 530 T-72 are reported to have been mothballed.
The type is greatly outnumbered by the T-64 family of tanks of various modifications — the Ukrainian armored force’s favorite workhorse. Ukraine has 720 T-64 tanks
Initially, the T-72 family was conceived by 1972 as a simpler and cheaper alternative to the T-64, the extremely successful though very complex and expensive main battle tank, even by Soviet standards.
As many as 30,000 T-72s have been produced in the Soviet Union’s Ural region, making it the world’s most numerous second generation tank of the 1960s-1970s.
Today Ukraine uses many T-72s in the war against Kremlin-backed forces occupying the Donbas.
But even though they had been successfully deployed to numerous conflicts around the world, including in Sudan, Syria and Ukraine, many believe that the T-72s never outshone the T-64s produced at Ukraine’s Kharkiv Malyshev Tank Factory.
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