Russia sends old Soviet T-55 tanks to the Ukrainian front

T-55 tanks adopted by the USSR in 1948. These tanks are so outdated that they can be seen in museums, CNN reports.

John Delany, a historian and curator at the Imperial War Museum in Duxford, said that the T-55 was the first main battle tank used by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. He explained that prior to the T-55, there were three types of tanks on the battlefield that performed different functions, and from the mid-1950s, the concept of a main battle tank that could perform different tasks emerged.

The T-55 tanks lagged behind Russia's armament in the 1980s, but were mothballed instead of scrapped. Delany believes a significant number of these tanks remain in storage, awaiting modernization.

Satellite imagery from April 21-22 shows Russia moving dozens of tanks from a depot at its base in Arsenyev, in the Far East. Western officials told CNN in April that they had discovered old tanks near the front line.

According to the intelligence website Oryx, Russia has lost more than 1,900 tanks since the start of its invasion of Ukraine, nearly two-thirds of its original stockpile of about 3,000.

Robert Lee, a former U.S. Marine and research fellow at the American Foreign Policy Research Institute, said Russia has lost a lot of equipment and that producing new equipment is a challenge.
"They are producing some new tanks, such as the T-90, but for the [required] scale they need more equipment than they can produce. So they depend on older tanks to make up for it," he said.

In addition, Trevor Taylor, director of the Defense, Industry and Society Program at the Royal United Services Institute, noted that Western sanctions are also making it difficult for Russia to produce weapons.

Lee believes that the use of the T-55 will be limited: "Some of these systems are likely to be used in the rear first. So it's not necessarily tanks going forward, it could be a long-range fire."

Meanwhile, Delany believes that T-55s could prove useful. "One of the possible strategies for using this [tank] is to put it in defensive positions, burying the tank in a hole so that only the turret is visible. Then they can be used to protect the front line from counterattacks," he said.