Experts, Western officials and leading analysts claim that Russia is ‘going backwards’ and the movement will increasingly rely on Cold War-era implements and tactics. The officials involved in the Tuesday briefing reported that there have been no ‘large upticks’ in better and more recent equipment being employed in Ukraine. Instead, the Russian army is returning to their stockpiles from the beginning of diplomacy in the Cold War. Monitoring organizations monitored the use of T-55 tanks as old as 1948.
The Washington DC-based think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies also echo the officials’ remarks but with further speculation. As Russia experiences a staggering loss in terms of equipment, the familiarity and quality of advanced technology is expected to decline in the immediate future because of sanctions implemented to deny Russian access to various technologies. T-62 tanks were significant examples of the types of weaponry being dusted off and reemployed, in order to make up for the gap in quality of the obsolete supplies.
The annual loss of Russian tanks in Ukraine earlier this year was estimated to be around 1,779 tanks. As a result, the speed of tank production is evidently not enough to meet these combat losses. One Western official was noted to say, “the need for new tanks is ten times higher than the capacity to produce them” which, in turn, leads to an increased employment of the Cold War-era tools.
The Oryx open source intelligence platform reportedly experienced a combat loss of 150 tanks per month. For a stock of Cold War-era weapons, this could cause major obligations for Russia, if not sooner, then sometime in the near future.
