Russia Is Burning Through One Of Its Last Stocks of Old Cold War Vehicles
The 50-year-old MT-LBu armored tractors won't last long in Ukraine
The 17-ton, eight-person MT-LBu is a Soviet-designed amphibious tractor that is almost always unarmed in its myriad versions, unlike the smaller MT-LB tractor that preceded it into service by a few years. Both vehicles have no more than 10 millimeters of armor—barely enough to stop small-arms fire.
The Kharkiv Tractor Factory in Kharkiv—yes, that’s in Ukraine—built tens of thousands of MT-LBs and MT-LBus starting in the early 1970s.
As Russian vehicle losses deepened in Ukraine during the first year of Russia’s wider war on Ukraine, and new production failed to keep up with the demand for replacements, the Russians began fetching thousands of MT-LBs from long-term storage—and sending them into battle at improvised, and very lightly protected, armored personnel carriers.
But now the MT-LBs are running out. The MT-LBus will be next.
The Russian army had around 3,500 MT-LBs in active service in early 2022. Another 2,700 were in storage. There were 1,500 MT-LBus in storage, too. By the summer of 2024, just 500 MT-LBs were left at the vehicle parks. It was unclear whether the remaining tractors were recoverable. It’s possible they were too badly rusted.
In theory, nearly 6,000 MT-LBs have passed through Russian service in the last 38 months. But the Russians have lost around 1,500 in combat and others have worn out—and now the MT-LB is becoming so rare that the slightly bigger, but no better-protected, MT-LBu is beginning to supplant it along the 700-mile front line.
By last fall, at least 500 MT-LBus had disappeared from the storage yards.
In late March, a Ukrainian marine corps drone operator with the callsign Kriegsforscher, deployed around the fortress city of Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine, observed a Russian assault group including a BMP-1 fighting vehicle and four MT-LBus.
“We wondered when the MT-LBus would start showing up more, and looks like they are,” Ukraine Control Map noted. Just a few dozen MT-LBus have been lost, but that number will increase at an accelerating rate.
In all, the Russians have lost around 21,000 vehicles and other heavy equipment in Ukraine. That’s a loss rate of 550 vehicles a month, or 6,600 a year. Russia builds maybe 200 new BMP-3 fighting vehicles and 90 new T-90M tanks annually as well as a few hundred other new armored vehicles including BTR-82 wheeled fighting vehicles.
That’s far too few. So when the old Cold War stock is gone, the Russian military’s accelerating de-mechanization will be complete—with profound implications for Moscow’s ability to achieve its war aims.
Many Russian assault groups already ride into battle in civilian compact cars, trucks and vans. Soon, many more of them will face an awful choice: roll across the drone-patrolling no-man’s-land in a Lada car … or walk.
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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 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.