Belarus has been actively removing tanks and infantry fighting vehicles from storage for over a week already. According to Ukraine’s military, this equipment might be intended for the russian armed forces combat needs. Considering that according to the Armed Forces of Ukraine 1361 russia’s tanks have been destroyed as on June 1. To understand the scale of the losses, before the invasion of the russian army had 3300 combat-ready tanks, according to the Military Balance website. They were divided by type: 2420 units of T-72, 550 units of T-80, and 360 units of T-90.
Thus, during the three months of the war, russia lost 41% of their combat-ready tanks overall. Obviously, the Kremlin is now trying to remove equipment from storage bases to recover losses.
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However, it’s an extremely long and costly process to remove the equipment from storage. In practice, you have to carry out a complete recovery, as wiring turns out to be rotten or the unit is simply disassembled with no necessary spare parts.
Talking about the complexity and other extra issues, the Armed Forces of Ukraine can prove that fact on their experience, while trying to carry out tanks and other armored vehicles deconservation in 2014 since first russia’s aggression.
In other words, the removal of equipment from conservation in Belarus is unlikely to help much in the short term. Especially since the volume of russia’s own storage bases is many times higher than in Balarus because, according to Military Balance, russia has about 10,000 tanks in storage. Of course, this is "on paper", because the real conditions of their storage are more like landfills.
But there is a possibility that the strengthening of the Russian army will take place in a slightly different, most importantly, faster and more threatening way. In particular, nothing prevents the Kremlin from "asking" Minsk for combat vehicles, namely those ones, which are in service of the Belarusian army.
This option allows to strengthen the tank units much faster than by deconservation. Moreover, the Belarusian Armed Forces has more than 500 T-72 tanks, about 20 of them are russian modernizations of the T-72B3.
In addition, a certain number of tanks was modernized by Belarus 140th repair plant. In particular, the modernization of the T-72B Vityaz (Knight) is known by installing Sosna-U sights (as on the T-72B3), updating the commander's sight, integration of digital radio communication systems and satellite navigation.
In case of this option implementation, the russian army can get combat vehicles much faster, and their combat effectiveness will be much higher comparing with those removed from storage bases. At the same time, to compensate such “assistance”, Belarus can remove tanks and other armored vehicles from conservation.
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