Originally Posted by
Sukiyama
Russia supplies mostly older, T-62 and T-64s, to Eastern Ukrainian rebels. Russia still has hundreds in their inventory. Plus, modernizing all of these tanks isn't actually that hard. Russia already has a lot of diesel engines that they themselves manufacture, and the T-64 isn't exactly a heavy tank. Plus, there's hundreds if not thousands of T-64s and T-62s in their inventory, Russia probably doesn't even know how many exactly they have. To demonstrate the issue, one of Russia's newer tank modernizations that are due to enter service in 2019-2020, is the T-80BVM. Now the T-80 uses Gas Turbine engines which were produced by Ukraine. What happened was, someone in Russia found a storage unit with a thousand of these spare engines, and that's why Russia decided to modernize the T-80. So... yeah, there's a ton of excess inventory that Russia can use. Especially in a limited conflict like Ukraine.
More than that, despite the fact that the upgraded T-72 variants will be the primary Russian tank for the next decade or so... the demand for T-72s and their upgraded variants is actually really high. Russia sold a lot of these tanks. I'm actually very sure that they don't have enough production capacity to rearm all of their divisions fast, which means they might have to send older tanks to their units for training. Russia's arms industry is improving every year, they are quickly retooling all of their factories, so I wouldn't be surprised to see more and more transitions towards more advanced equipment. Recently the air-defense component for Gorshkov frigates was finished, in another 5 years a turbine will be designed for them as well. I think Adar was pretty spot-on with his analysis a couple years ago when he predicted that Russia is quickly rearming and becoming a very dangerous force.