ictures and video have emerged of what experts say are T-54 and T-55 tanks being transported by rail from a military depot for mothballed equipment in Russia’s far east.
If sent into Ukraine, the vehicles would probably become the oldest main battle tanks used in the conflict.
The images were released by Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT), an independent Russian intelligence group. It did not reveal how it had obtained the pictures or where they were taken.
Other social media sites later released footage of what appeared to be the same train.
CIT said transport databases showed the train had departed from Arsenyev, the town in the far eastern Primorsky region that is home to the 1295th Central Tank Repair and Storage Base of mothballed military equipment.
It is not clear what the tanks’ destination is, or whether they will see combat. But the fact they have been taken out of storage is being taken by experts as further confirmation of a high level of attrition of more modern vehicles.
“What this tells us is that all the remaining modern tanks are in or around Ukraine. So there are no more modern tanks left in stockpiles. It suggests they’ve used up all the T-62s they have in service so they are down to T-55s,” said Ben Barry, an armoured warfare expert at the think tank, referring to another obsolete tank Russia has used to plug gaps in its arsenal.
“It suggests the Ukrainians are continuing to knock out their modern tanks and the proportion of modern tanks being used against Ukraine begins to decline – at a time when the West is supplying modern tanks.”
Exactly how many tanks Moscow has lost in the war is disputed. The Ukrainian army’s rolling tally of claimed Russian tank losses stood at 3,557 yesterday. Oryx, an open-source intelligence agency, says it has counted about 1,700 confirmed Russian tank losses.
Experts at the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS), a British military think tank, said in February that it had confirmed the same number as Oryx but that the true figure could be between 2,000 and 2,300.
That means Russia has lost about half of the modern T-72s and two-thirds of its T-80s that made up its active modern tank fleet when the war began. IISS estimated Russia had 2,927 modern tanks in total and 10,200 tanks in storage, most of which were T-72s and T-80s, when the war began.
Russia appeared to have started dusting off mothballed tanks to replace tank losses shortly after its failed attempt to take Kyiv towards the start of the war. As early as May last year, obsolete T-62 tanks were seen on the front lines, particularly on the southern front around Kherson.
Meanwhile, Russia stepped up its missile and drone attacks against Ukraine yesterday, killing students and other civilians. “Russia is shelling the city with bestial savagery,” president Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote in a Telegram post accompanying video showing what he said was a Russian missile striking a nine-storey apartment building on a busy road in the southeastern city of Zaporizhzhia.
“Residential areas where ordinary people and children live are being fired at.”
At least one person was killed in the attack shown in the Zaporizhzhia video, apparently recorded by closed circuit TV cameras.
Elsewhere, Moscow’s forces launched exploding drones before dawn, killing seven people in or near a student dormitory near Kyiv.
Zaporizhzhia city is about 100km from the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, Europe’s largest which has come under threat during the war and has been shut down for months.
The UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency reported the plant had suffered another loss of a back-up external power source. Its six reactors still need power to cool nuclear fuel, and were relying on only a primary source yesterday. (© Telegraph Media Group Ltd 2023)