Thread by @HighMarsed

1/ We recently published our numbers for remaining T-80B/BV tanks in russian storage. In this thread I will try to estimate the number of active tanks of this type to get a better understanding of how long we can expect to see them on the battlefield.⬇️

2/ First of all here are the numbers in a table and you can also find them in the video linked below.

3/ To understand why the T-80B/BV are so important I have asked @whitherapathy to make me a graph of the share of T-80B/BV among the destroyed and captured tanks registered by Oryx. As you can see the type has made up a significant share of the losses since mid 2022.

4/ Interestingly Russia only had about 120 T-80BV (MB 2022) in active service at the start of 2022, which shows that many stored tanks of this type were likely in good condition and activated quickly. The T-80BV seems to have been the main replacment for modern tank losses.

5/ Accoording to Oryx there are 618 entries for T-80B/BV variants and to keep the caclculations simple I will assume 650 losses. Additionally Russia has been upgrading some of the stored tanks to T-80BVM and I will assume that ~150 T-80B/BV were used for this purpose.

6/ In total they have probably either upgraded or lost 800 T-80B/BV tanks and removed between 925 to 1700 from storage, depending on how many they had in the garages. This would suggest an active T-80B/BV fleet of 250 to 1020 including the 120 pre-war active tanks.

7/ The most likely numbers are probably right in the middle somewhere between 500-800 tanks and about 280 remaining in storage. I think it is likely that the stored tanks are held back to be upgraded to T-80BVM (or other upgrade package).

8/ In this chart (by @whitherapathy) you can see that Oryx records more than 20 T-80B/BV losses in some months. If we assume that the only T-80B/BVs being sent to the front by now are repaired units then the active fleet might shrink to 380-580 tanks by the end of the year.

9/ We will probably see the share of T-80B/BV in the russian tank fleet decline further over time, although this might not be visible in the losses since the whole active tank fleet is likely shrinking as well.

10/ One problem with this analysis could be that Russia has announced to restart T-80 production. I dont think that this will happen in relevant numbers, but the effort might enable them to reactivate more hulls from storage and keep more damaged tanks running.

11/ There are also some T-80 tanks at the 61st and 103rd BTRZ, which I dont consider reactivateable. Additionally they have been removing many of the stored T-80U/UDs recently from the 22nd and I dont know how these might be used in the future.

@Strien9 There is another issue with the possibility of 6000 losses: they might have removed 2,5k tanks from visible storage and had ~3,3k in active service so they must have taken at least 2,2k from garages, which is not impossible but also not very likely in my opinion.

@Strien9 Assuming a current active tank fleet of 2000. If this number is higher then the number of tanks in garages has to be even higher.