Kremlin leaders often demonstrate a complete disconnection from reality, and the Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of the russia, Dmitrii Medvedev, suffers from this in particular, constantly threatening with nuclear weapons for crossing the next red line.
The last of them was intended to assure russia’s citizens that "there is no reason to panic" and that everything is "under complete control", there is no shortage of weapons. And the key phrase was that in 2023 it is planned to produce 1.5 thousand tanks.
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In particular, if compare the report from russia’s Ministry of Defense regarding the production of tanks in 2021, according to which russia’s Armed Forces received a total of about 500 units of armored vehicles, of them approximately half are tanks. That is, 250 units of new and modernized main battle tanks per year.
But russia switched its factories to a 24/7 mode, introduced norms that are close to war communism with 10-year terms for non-fulfillment of orders and "squeezing" the factory in the style of the 90s. And in these conditions, the industry is supposed to start producing a much larger amount of weapons, but it’s impossible, and as reported by russia’s Minister of Defense Shoigu himself: draconian methods led to only a 30% increase in the production of weapons and military equipment in 2022.
But even if russia increases the production comparing to 2021 is 60%, the number of tanks will increase to 400 vehicles. And now to understand the real pace of losses in russia: according to the reports of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, as of January 25, the number of destroyed enemy tanks was 3,175, and as of March 24 it is 3,574 units. That is, it took 57 days to destroy a similar number of enemy tanks.
At the same time, for russia, even the figure of 400 tanks per year looks doubtful, even taking into account all possible accelerations and even with the removal of such tanks as the T-54 and T-55 from conservation. Overall, the production of new tanks at the Uralvagonzavod, which works at a 24/7 pace and involves prisoners in the production, is rather optimistically outlined at the level of 20 new tanks per month. That is, exactly 240 new tanks per year.
Regarding restoration, there is data that the repair capacity of the Uralvagonzavod is 8 vehicles per month, and three more russia’s armored repair plants can each restore up to 17 vehicles. But this data does not correlate with the announced current capabilities of the 103rd Armored Tank Repair Plant near Chita, which restores T-62s at a rate of about 7 tanks per month.
At the same time, restored vehicles are also those tanks that were damaged on the front line and were sent for repair, or simply have to undergo regular overhaul, which according to regulations is performed once every 14 thousand km (for the T-72 tank).
And all this without mentioning the fact that in russia, the new T-72B3 and T-80BVM are undergoing a simplified modernization. That in addition to tanks, there is another armored vehicle, and the combat capability of the machines must be maintained by the production of an astronomical number of engines, because the resource of the "boosted" B-92 for the T-72B3 is 1200 hours...
But it is unlikely that the Kremlin pays attention to this, as one more phrase of Medvedev makes it quite clear how exactly russia wants to work with armored plants. In particular, he noted that he started reading letters from the Second World War signed by Stalin to the directors of armored factories and wants to introduce their content to the directors of russian enterprises.
Thus, it remains only to wait until the Kremlin resumes the practice of mass executions for failure to fulfill the plan.
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