Russia’s Tank Plan: Take A 60-Year-Old T-62, Install New Optics, Send It To Ukraine To Get Blown Up

The Russian army is making half-hearted efforts to upgrade some of the 60-year-old T-62 tanks it has deployed to Ukraine. But don’t count on newer optics or a few blocks of reactive armor to save the aged tanks.

A photo appeared online on Saturday depicting an upgraded T-62 possibly somewhere in eastern Ukraine.

The tank appears to be intact, which itself is noteworthy. Among the 1,770 tanks the Russians have lost in the first year of their wider war on Ukraine are no fewer than 65 T-62s. The Ukrainians have captured so many T-62s that they’ve begun converting some of them into engineering vehicles.

What’s special about the T-62 is its optics. Back in the 1970s and ’80s, a 40-ton, four-person T-62 had either a TSh-2B-41 or a TShSM-41U gunner’s sight and active thermal sights—which work with an infrared spotlight—from the TKN-2 family.

The sights allowed a T-62 gunner to fire his 115-millimeter smoothbore gun around a mile during the day and maybe half a mile at night. Accuracy largely depended on whether the tank was moving.

That ain’t great. The German Leopard 1A5, which entered service in the mid-1980s, around the same time as the modernized T-62M and T-62MV—the latter adds bolt-on reactive armor—has an EMES-18 gunner’s sight that has probably twice the effective range under the same conditions.

And the Leopard 1A5 unlike the T-62M/MV has excellent stabilization for its weapons, meaning the German tank accurately can fire on the move.

As it pulls as many as 800 T-62s from long-term storage, Russian tank-maker Uralvagonzavod is fitting some of them with the 1PN96MT-02 analogue thermal gunner’s sight that’s a generation newer than the T-62’s previous gunner’s sight.

The 1PN96MT-02 would’ve been state-of-the-art ... in the 1970s. It allows a gunner to engage a target as far as two miles away. That’s two-thirds the maximum range of the newer, digital Sonsa-U sight that equips the latest T-90 tanks as well as a few upgraded T-80s and T-72s.

The main problem with the Sosna-U might be that it includes high-quality French components that Russian industry can’t seem to duplicate, and which Russia can’t legally import owing to sanctions France imposed after Russian troops invaded Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014.

So the simpler but less-capable 1PN96MT-02 is showing up on more and more of Russia’s “war reserve” tanks—not just T-62s, but also T-72s and T-80s. It’s clear Russian industry can’t produce Sosna-Us fast enough to keep pace with the reactivation of old tanks.

The best reactivated T-62 would be a T-62MV with reactive armor and a 1PN96MT-02 sight. Call it a T-62MV Obr. 2022 or Obr. 2023.

This “new” T-62 can see a bit farther than an “old” T-62 and also resist high-explosive shells a bit better. But it’s still a T-62. And it’s still mostly just target practice for Ukrainian troops.