Comments by "Chef Chaudard" (@chefchaudard3580) on "Russia Sending T-55s to Ukraine?" video.

The MoD already issued a contract for the modernization of 800 T-62s over several years, few month ago. Meaning they had already planned to reuse all available T-72 hulls, either as is, or refurbished. Next in the line is the T-55. I agree with you that moving these tanks does not mean they head for the war, though. They can be modified as tank recovery vehicles, bridge layers or other specialized tanks, APCs... We'll see.
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@venator5 i disagree. The russians have probably lost much more tanks than "1950" . Oryx has almost reached that number, and it does not include the ones that were towed and cannot be repaired, those lost on the russian side we have no picture of, and the worn out ones after a year of war. I would say they lost 100% of the tanks they had before the war (2600 acccording to some sites). Specially since most of the losses are the "best" they had, T72M, the workhorse of the russian army, and T-80BM and BVM. The fact they had to pull out T-62s from the graveyards shows they could not make the number with more advanced T-80 and T-72s. I estimate Russian forces has about 2000 tanks in its inventory. They must keep some on the borders, let say 1000, 500 in front of NATO, 500 in the East. And that is a minimum for a credible force (China or Poland alone would outnumber that easily). There are about 1000 tanks in Ukraine at the moment, about the same number than the Ukrainians have. And they loose about 10 tanks a day...
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@venator5 We agree that Oryx is not accurate. But I still think that many tanks are not in the database, for the reasons I gave. And some errors in the counting cannot make up for that. We agree to disagree. for your various points Everything shows that the Russians rely more and more on old tanks. They still have more or less the same number of tanks (I think that, so far, they basically replaced tanks lost by the ones taken from storage), but they are scrapping the bottom of the barrel. So, they still have tanks. For the moment 1 - I highly doubt they have enough mobile troups to exploit any breakthrough. Their army is now down to conscripts armed with old armour. They were never good at combined arms even with trained soldiers. Now with conscripts and obsolete stuff... 2 - Maybe they did ask to China and N. Korea. And both refused (N. Korea is a chinese satellite BTW, they have to ask to their big brother for the go ahead... And if China refused to supply tanks...). Europe and the USA, China's major customers, would retaliate if tanks were supplied. I don't think China is ready for an economic war to sustain Russia, after the COVID and real estate crisis. 3 - Some pictures of Indian T-90S tanks with Russian markings let think that some of the tanks India sent to Russia for refurbishment were taken over by Russian army. So, it contradicts what you say... 4 - They are. Many tanks destroyed on Oryx are old crap. The "best" ones are T-90Ms, but there are few of them, and a bunch of T-72Ms and T-80s, which are not particularly good nor recent. Add to that many T-72B of all variants, T-62M that were retired in 2013 after being retained for second line duties, everything shows they are using everything they can put their hand on. Some propaganda pictures or promises do not represent what is actually on the battlefield. 5 - They do! According to the new composition of the BTG that leaked on the Internet, the number of tanks in a BTG has gone down from 10... to 3! As I mentioned, they put old crap from storage to make up for the numbers, but it seems they are short anyway. An explanation would be that tanks are useless, but why use obsolete tanks if tanks are of no use? The best explanation is that if they had enough tanks, they would have retained them in the BTGs.
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Gun lifetime is a few hundred shells. Meaning that it is worn out after a few days if used as an artillery piece. I doubt that moving that many tanks around, repair them, to have them back in the warehouse within a few days for a gun replacement makes sense.
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