When Russian tanks rolled past, the T-64BV crews opened fire at point-blank range, counting on their faster autoloaders to give them an advantage over Russian crews. In pitched fighting outside Chernihiv in the early weeks of the current, wider war, the Ukrainian army’s 1st Tank Brigade deployed its roughly 100 T-64BVs into the forests between Chernihiv and nearby Kyiv.
The T-64BV is perfectly capable of beating even the newest Russian tanks. The new T-64BV variant boasts modern optics, including a passive infrared sight-no spotlight-plus tightly-fitting reactive armor blocks. The Russian invasion of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014 motivated the Ukrainian defense ministry to revamp the T-64 fleet. Their guns, engines and autoloaders still worked just fine, but their optics-including a passive infrared sight that required a matching infrared spotlight-were outdated and their armor was lacking. The Ukrainian army for its part stuck with the T-64 and, to a lesser extent, a turbine-powered version of the T-80.Īfter five decades, the T-64s were on the verge of obsolescence. While the T-80 factory was in Russia, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Russian army gradually standardized on the simpler, cheaper T-72 and T-90. But the T-64 had Ukrainian DNA and, of course, was manufactured in Ukraine by some of the Soviet Union’s best engineers and skilled laborers. The T-72 meanwhile evolved into the T-90. As a bonus, the T-72 is made in Russia at the Uralvagonzavod factory in Nizhny Tagil.įrom the T-64’s introduction in 1963, the Soviet Union had two parallel tank lines. The resulting T-72 had a simpler but slower autoloader and a less complex transmission. So while some of the best Soviet formations re-equipped with the Ukrainian-made T-64, the Soviet army launched development of a cheaper alternative.
The result was a fast, heavily-armed and thickly-armored tank that, on paper, at least matched contemporary Western tanks.īut the T-64 was complex, hard to build and expensive.
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