The war in Ukraine is the best-documented in history, with online analysts getting high-resolution imagery or the action practically as it happens. While this is a very selective view — we only see what one side or the other wishes to share — certain aspects can be explored in forensic detail. Close examination of Russian tank losses has turned up an anomaly. Hardly any of the modern T-90A tanks have been destroyed, indicating this type has not been widely deployed in Ukraine. What happened to Russia’s modern tanks — and do they even exist?
Russia’s Tank Fleet: Something Old, Something New
Ever since the Cold War, Russia has lacked the money to field a completely modern tank fleet. The armored force consists of a variety of older types, modernized to a greater to lesser extent, with a small elite force of modern tanks including the T-90A.
“Russia should have a lot of T-90s. There should be 120 original T-90 and 369 T-90As including subvariants,” open-source analyst Richard Vereker told Forbes. “But only 34 T-90As have been lost, and only 3 of them after March 2023. So where have they gone?”
Modern a relative term; the T-90As were built around 30 years ago, between 1992-95. But they are still a distinct improvement on the older T-80s and T-72s — and T-62s and even T-55s — that Russia is now pushing forwards. It seems Russia is fighting with it’s second, third and fourth best.
Vereker contrasts the T-90A numbers with Russia’s T-80Us, where the majority of the original fleet can be accounted for, including over 50% destroyed. But we are simply not seeing a corresponding proportion of the T-90As in images of burned-out armor.
It is certainly not because they are invulnerable. The T-90A is not quite the most modern tank in service – that honor goes to the upgraded version, the T-90M, which did not appear in the initial invasion, but started appearing (and getting knocked out) from April 2022 onwards. T-90Ms are regularly knocked out by artillery, missiles and even FPV kamikaze drones. Fewer than 200 T-90Ms have been built, and some 49 are known to have been lost in Ukraine or around 25%. The T-90As are less well-protected but only about 7% of the supposed fleet have shown up destroyed.
Vereker produces graphs and charts of Russian vehicle losses by type, using figures from the Warspotting site , whose numbers are similar to the more famous Oryx analysis of Russian losses. The changes over time generally show how the modern vehicles in the first wave of the invasion are gradually fading out and a greater percentage of the casualties are older tanks and personnel carriers.
The Missing Tank Mystery
But the T-90A numbers do not add up.
“Fifty of the original T-90s are known to be in a storage facility,” says Vereker. But even taking the best estimates and allowing for all possible missing vehicles, he says, “we are still missing 217 T-90As.”
Vereker sought answers from the collective wisdom of his Twitter/X followers and carried out a poll on the most likely explanation. Almost 1300 readers voted on the issue. Nobody knows for sure, but many in this group may have insight into the most likely explanation
14% thought the missing T-90As were also being held in storage in addition to the 50 we know about. Only Moscow would know why this decision was made. It could be a long-term plan to preserve a modern tank force, though a small one, after this conflict is over. Or the T-90As may be in storage because they are not battle-ready.
17.8% thought the tanks were defending Moscow. They might be an emergency reserve in case Putin has to defend Russian soil from a Ukrainian offensive – or if Russian fears of a war with NATO materialize.
20.5% though the T-90As had been quietly upgraded at some point and sold on the export market. The T-90S is an export version, of the T-90 operated mainly by India. The majority of Indian T-90S were built there, but an initial batch of 124 were made in Russia. Algeria also purchased 185 T-90S, and Armenia, Turkmenistan, Uganda and Vietnam all operate this type. Vietnam received the last of its 64 T-90S in 2019.
The suggestion is that while most of the T-90S were newly-built, Russia may have converted some of the existing T-90A to T-90S standard rather than build from scratch. The T-90S sells for a reported $4.5m, and the temptation to turn tanks into cash may have been strong.
Ghost Fleet?
The most popular explanation, favored by 47.7% of those polled, was that the missing T-90As never even existed. There does not seem to be any solid evidence they were ever there, no picture of all 200 lined up in one place. All we have are media reports of the original contracts, so we are simply trusting what the suppliers and the Russian Ministry of Defence say. In this ‘ghost fleet’ scenario, T-90A production figures were deliberately inflated for propaganda purposes.
So long as enough T-90s were available for military parades, the Russian Army could maintain the pretense of being a modern fighting force, to its own people and to the world. Meanwhile the troops were struggling with the T-72s their fathers had driven.
Vereker himself prefers a different explanation.
“Another possibility, in my opinion the most likely, is that they are at the factory ready to be converted into T-90Ms,” says Vereker.
This is not quite the same as being in storage, and the tanks may or may not be in fighting condition, but they are needed to keep the T-90M production process going – despite Russian claims that the latest T-90Ms are all new-built from scratch.
Most of the ‘new’ tanks going to the front line to replace Russia’s phenomenal losses have actually been rebuilt of refurbished tanks from long-term storage. If the T-90Ms from UralVagonZavod – dubbed “Putin’s favorite factory” are also just updated T-90As, then their production capacity must be very limited.
“If accurate, this would imply that Russia’s ability to make brand new T-90Ms is less than we thought, and when they run out of T-90A to convert Russia will have to slow down the rate of all-new tanks going to the front line,” says Vereker.
Russia has now lost more tanks than were included in the original invasion force, and there are indications they are running out of old tanks in a usable condition to be updated.
Putin’s great hope is that the West, if not Ukraine, will tire of this war first and that his army can keep fighting until he can force a peace settlement. But Putin may be wishing that he had a few hundred more T-90As to shore up the front line alongside the antique T-72s.
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