![]() Artillery, including rockets and mortars, accounted for most of the losses. The army last year revealed that 440 of its tanks were destroyed or damaged in Donbas between April 2014 and June 2016. ![]() ![]() The war was hard on the Ukrainian armor corps. Fewer than a hundred Bulats were available. When Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014 and subsequently backed anti-government separatists in Ukraine’s Donbas region, the Ukrainian army went to war mostly with the aged, 1985-vintage T-64BVs in its inventory. The resulting T-64BM Bulat boasts better reactive armor, a new gun and a locally made night sight.īulat production was slow. The government in 1999 began modernizing 1983-vintage T-64BMs. Kiev initially struggled to maintain and upgrade its T-64s. In short, Ukraine as an accident of history wound up with the more complex and conceptually advanced tank type, while Russia-by far a bigger and richer country-settled on the less sophisticated but more practical tank. The latest T-72 variant, the T-90, borrows some of the T-80’s best features including the composite armor, but retains the T-72’s basic automotive systems. Today the Russian army has discarded most of the T-64 variants in favor of T-72 models, which are easier to build and maintain. Russia for its part held onto thousands of T-64s and T-80s, but their numbers steadily declined over the years. When the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, Ukraine inherited hundreds of T-64s … and the factory that built the type. The T-80, an improved T-64 with composite armor and a gas turbine replacing the diesel engine, appeared in the mid-1970s. ![]()
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