‘Reload Faster!’ Go Inside A Russian T

Russian defense minister Sergei Shoigu inspects T-62M tanks.

As Russian tank losses in Ukraine exceeded a thousand last summer—that’s nearly a third of the tanks the country went to war with—the Kremlin got desperate.

Throttled by foreign sanctions, in particular a French ban on the export of Sosna-U optics, Russia’s two tank factories were producing just a couple of dozen new T-72B3s, To-80BVMs and T-90Ms a month. Not nearly enough to make good front-line losses.

So it was perhaps unavoidable—but no less shocking for its inevitability—that the Russian defense ministry would drag long-stored Cold War tanks from its vast vehicle parks.

The Russians started by reactivating hundreds of 1960s-vintage T-62s, many of which had undergone a deep upgrade in the 1980s. A year later, we have a rare chance to go inside one of the 40-ton, four-person tanks in combat in Zaporizhzhia Oblast, the locus of Ukraine’s long-anticipated southern counteroffensive.

A recent video from inside the tank’s turret could underscore what analysts have been saying for months now: that the Russians mostly are using the aging T-62s not as tanks per se, but as crude artillery. Perhaps to help compensate for deep losses of purpose-made howitzers.

“Reload faster!” a crewman shouts between laughter as the loader struggles to remove spent shell casings from the breech of the aging tank’s 115-millimeter gun. The T-62 was the last Soviet tank to have a four-person crew with a human loader; later tanks have three crew and an autoloader.

The T-62 fires several rounds at what one excited crewman calls the “fucking Ukrainians.” Whether the crew actually sees any Ukrainians is an open question, however.

The T-62 isn’t moving, not even between shots. That’s what you’d expect if the tank were functioning as a sort of semi-mobile pillbox or artillery emplacement, perhaps without a driver aboard.

The tank in the video obviously is a T-62M Obr. 2022. That’s the unofficial designation observers have given to the subset of reactivated T-62s that the 103rd Repair Plant in Siberia updated with a newer, but not exactly new, thermal sight before shipping it off to Ukraine.

The 1PN96MT-02 sight would’ve been state-of-the-art ... in the 1970s. It allows a gunner accurately to engage a target as far as two miles away in a direct-fire mode. That’s two-thirds the maximum effective direct-fire range of the newer, fully digital Sonsa-U sight.

If a T-62 crew wants to shoot farther, it can angle its gun higher and shoot ballistically. Soviet vehicle-makers designed their tanks to do this, and Soviet doctrine explains when and where they should do so, but that doesn’t mean a tank makes a very good howitzer.

Consider the T-54/55, the 1950s-vintage tank that came before the T-62 and which the Russians also have been restoring for front-line use.

The T-54/55’s 54-caliber D-10T gun has a muzzle velocity of 3,300 feet per second. On a typical vehicle mount, the gun can elevate as high as 18 degrees. That’s low compared to a purpose-built howitzer. The Soviet 2S1, for instance, elevates as high as 70 degrees.

The low elevation obviously limits the D-10T’s range while firing indirectly at targets beyond visual range. Another limitation is that a D-10T’s ammunition, like all modern tank ammo, is “fixed.” That is, it includes the warhead and charge in a single pre-made unit. In contrast to an artillery crew, a tank crew can’t add powder bags to the charge to boost its firing range.

When fitted to a tank, the D-10T pairs with a tank gunner’s sight—a TSh 2-22 on many T-54s and T-55s. The sight’s range reticle only goes as high as 6,000 meters or so—that’s 6,600 yards, 3.75 miles—for the farthest-firing high-explosive shells.

So a T-54/55 crew fighting as artillery gunners probably would need help from a spotter while aiming at a target near the D-10T’s theoretical maximum range of more than 17,000 yards, or nearly 10 miles. Accuracy could suffer.

Finally, tank ammunition and tank guns aren’t designed for the fast, repetitive combat tempo—load, fire, load, fire for hours on end—that’s typical for howitzers. True artillery barrels are built to last. Tank gun barrels on the other hand tend to overheat, droop and lose accuracy with hard use.

So the T-54/55 can double as artillery, but only as an expedient. As improvised howitzers, the tanks’ D-10T guns lack range, accuracy and durability.

The T-62 boasts a 54-caliber U-5TS smoothbore gun that elevates to 18 degrees and fires shells at a velocity of nearly 5,600 feet per second. So it can shoot farther than a D-10T can do—but no more accurately in an indirect fire mode. And a U-5TS is no more resistant to wear and tear than the older gun is.

All that is to say that there’s a strong possibility the crew of the T-62 in that video is lobbing shells at something that’s within the tank’s maximum firing range, but well beyond its accurate firing range.

The Russians are having a blast shooting at “fucking Ukrainians.” But although it’s hard to gauge their gun’s elevation, and by extension whether they’re fighting as artillery, there’s a good chance they actually are shooting at ... nothing.