Russia wants to restore production of Т-80 tanks

11 September, 2023 Semi-assembled T-80BV tanks during overhaul at Omsktransmash. Photo credits: Rostec The Russian concern Uralvagonzavod is working on setting up production of Soviet ?-80 series tanks from scratch.

This was announced on the live of the Russian propaganda show by the Director General of the defense concern Alexander Potapov. "This is the task, the military has set it before us," Potapov said, answering questions about the resumption of tank production. According to him, interaction and processing of issues regarding the establishment of production processes with the Ministry of Industry and Trade are currently underway.

"This [production] requires, accordingly, new capacities," Potapov emphasizes. The production is planned to be established on the basis of the Omsktransmash armored plant, which in Soviet times was a manufacturer of tanks of the ?-80 series. With the collapse of the USSR, the enterprise ceased to receive state defense orders for the manufacture of new machines and, in fact, degraded to the level of a tank repair plant.

Since 2017, the company has been overhauling the tanks that returned from storage bases and upgrading them to the ?-80BVM version.

T-80BVM tank of the Russian Armed Forces. September 2022. Photo credits: Russian mass media

The deployment of tank production is an extremely difficult task, which will require the involvement of a large number of professional specialists and new high-quality machines.

Both areas are weak places for the Russian Federation due to poor personnel policy, the decline of educational institutions and the lack of machine tools of the appropriate level.

A new generation of ?-80

It should be noted that the conditional "new T-80" will likely have little in common with those vehicles that Omsktransmash has been manufacturing and is currently modernizing. Some of the tank units will be replaced by their modern counterparts, as, for example, old tank sights were replaced by the modern Russian Sosna-U sight complex. Some technical solutions, such as casting a tank turret into a mold, are now simply impossible in the Russian Federation and will be replaced by alternative technologies such as welding from ready-made armor plates in the case of making towers.

Currently, the Russian industry is already manufacturing part of the units for ?-80, which are used for repair and modernization.

These are Sosna-U tank sights or simpler and cheaper 1PN-96MT-02, GTD-1250 gas turbine engines, 2?46? tank guns, as well as a number of smaller assemblies.