According to the 2024 production report, the Uralvagonzavod armor plant could have processed about 200 T-72B and T-72B1 main battle tanks, all modernized to the T-72B3 standard and delivered to the russian army on top of 60 to 80 newly-made T-90M Proryv tanks and a few BMPT Terminator tank support fighting vehicles.
The statistics were summarized by Polish website Defence24 with reference to the data provided by armor industry researcher Andrii Tarasenko on his Twitter profile.
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Uralvagonzavod fulfilled its 2024 contracts for T-90M and T-72B3M tanks and sent two trains to Russian troops, the press service of the concern told journalists. The last transfer of equipment from UVZ was in September. The footage shows a train with 4 T-90M tanks in new drone… pic.twitter.com/0WT8paEi3s— Andrei_bt (@AndreiBtvt) December 31, 2024
As the journalists noted, these 200 modernized and approximately 60–80 new MBTs are not enough to cover the concurrent losses of the russian invasion forces. In almost three years of intense hostilities, russians have lost over 3,700 tanks as of today.
Moreover, russian manufacturers are running out of resources for replenishment of their armored vehicle fleet with fewer and fewer mothballed T-72s left at their long-term storage bases, not to mention the repairability issues Defense Express covered previously.
At the same time, russia's progress in its effort to resume serial production of T-80 tanks remains unclear. Such plans were announced back in the fall of 2023 with no meaningful updates since then. However, there is evidence that the russian military-industrial complex has apparently reopened production of gas turbine engines for the T-80.
Defense Express would like to point out a few key details. First, the data is illustrative of how Poland, an Eastern NATO flank country, views and evaluates the threat posed by russian military production ramping up.
Besides, the assessment of production capacity based on the performance of Uralvagonzavod specifically is quite a correct way to evaluate the situation in general. After all, it's the largest enterprise in the armored industry in particular and of the russian military-industrial complex as a whole; according to public data, the staff of UVZ counts 12,000 employees in total.
Earlier, Defense Express also covered one revealing statement by representatives of this russia enterprise: Uralvagonzavod employees claimed they had restored a T-90M Proryv tank after it got hit by 26 drones in just 4 weeks. It was illustrative of how russian weapons production statistics are artificially "inflated" by including such repairs in the figures.
Read more: Researchers Counted Remaining T-80 MBTs in russian Storage, Enough to Keep the Army Supplied Until 2026
