In 2022, Russia Had 2,700 Old MT-LB Armored Tractors In Storage. It's Already Sent Most Of Them To Ukraine.
The Russian military is undergoing rapid de-mechanization.
The Russian military went to war in Ukraine in February 2022 with around 11,000 infantry fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers. In 28 months of hard fighting, it has lost around 6,500 of them.
Russian industry might produce a thousand new BMP IFVs annually—far too few to make good the roughly 2,800 IFVs and APCs the Russians are losing every year. The balance must come from old Cold War stocks.
But these stocks are finite—and that has profound implications for the Russian war effort as the wider war in Ukraine grinds into the its third year.
Put simply, Russia is running out of armored vehicles. Which helps to explain why we’re seeing so many civilian-style vehicles on the Russian side of the 700-mile front line: golf carts, motorcycles, trucks, vans.
The MT-LB armored tractor illustrates the problem. The 13-ton, 13-person tracked vehicle—which entered production in the early 1970s—is lightly-protected. But it’s reliable and versatile. And it’s better than a golf cart for direct assaults on Ukrainian positions.
Soviet industry produced tens of thousands of MT-LBs, primarily in Soviet Ukraine. The Russian army had around 3,500 MT-LBs in active service in early 2022. Around 2,700 were in storage. As losses of heavier BMP IFVs deepened in Ukraine, the Kremlin began dragging those MT-LBs out of open storage at 26 different sites.
By the summer of 2024, just 500 MT-LBs were left at the vehicle parks. It’s unclear whether the remaining tractors are recoverable. It’s possible they’re too badly rusted.
In theory, 5,700 MT-LBs have passed through Russian service in the last 28 months. But the Russians have lost around a thousand in combat—and the loss rate is increasing as the armored tractor becomes one of the dominant types in front-line service.
Once the surviving 4,700 MT-LBs are gone, the type could become functionally extinct in Russian service. By then, it’s possible the only IFVs and APCs available to the Russians will be whatever new IFVs and APCs they can build. Again, they’re currently managing to produce just a thousand or so annually. At the current rate of loss, a thousand new IFVs and APCs would disappear in four or five months.
“Russia’s use of stored and obsolescent MT-LB armored personnel carriers suggests that Russia’s materiel and force-generation problems continue,” the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, D.C. explained in July 2022. Two years later, the problems are much, much worse.
The Russian military is undergoing a rapid de-mechanization. Yes, there are still more than 8,000 non-MT-LB armored vehicles in storage in Russia, but it’s possible most of them are in poor condition and essentially irrecoverable. Expect to see more and more troops riding in civilian vehicles … or marching into battle on foot.
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