Russia’s top tank maker takes on T-90 repairs as new builds strain

Uralvagonzavod, Russia’s main tank manufacturer and the only plant building new T-90M tanks, is now taking on major repairs of T-90Ms wrecked in Ukraine, work that analysts say was traditionally handled by military repair plants and now competes with the factory’s production of new tanks.

A train carrying heavily damaged T-90Ms was photographed on its way to the plant in Nizhny Tagil, according to analysts tracking Russian armor. The photos, which circulated on social media this week, show tanks with extensive damage loaded on rail cars.

Andrei Tarasenko, an armored vehicle analyst, said Uralvagonzavod has ended up doing the repairs because Russia’s network of military armored repair plants, known by the Russian abbreviation BTRZ, has broken down, and that rebuilding a tank at a production plant costs about as much as building a new one.

“Damaged T-90Ms on the way to UVZ. Having ruined the BTRZ system, the monopoly corporation is also engaged in capital repairs that are completely outside its core business, since under factory conditions (not at a BTRZ) a repair costs as much as a new tank,” Tarasenko wrote in Russian.

Damaged T-90Ms

Jakub Janovsky, a lead analyst with the open-source project Oryx, which documents equipment losses in the war from photo and video evidence, said the repaired tanks could also blur the picture of how many new tanks Russia actually builds.

“On the other hand, some organizations might end up counting factory repairs (and/or any additional upgrades) of these tanks as ‘new production,’” Janovsky wrote on X.

Janovsky added that whether a damaged tank can be recovered at all depends heavily on where it is hit. Vehicles disabled in the contested gray zone between the two armies are usually destroyed before they can be dragged out, he said, while tanks damaged farther back can be recovered for repair with much less effort.

Analysts have tied the shift to the pressure on Russia’s tank industry from Western sanctions and labor shortages. Some T-90Ms leaving Uralvagonzavod have been found to use refurbished hulls from older T-90A tanks rather than newly built ones, and the company has openly promoted its repair work, saying in 2024 that it had restored a T-90M in four weeks after the tank was hit by 26 drones.

A T-90M tank equipped with the Arena-M active protection system during Exercise Tsenter-2026.

The plant still ships new and upgraded vehicles. Earlier this week, Uralvagonzavod said it had delivered another batch of T-90M and upgraded T-72B3M tanks with extra protection against drones, without saying how many. Some T-90Ms now carry the Arena-M active protection system, which Russian forces demonstrated shooting down attacking drones during the Tsentr-2026 exercise.