A year ago, independent analysts noted an uptick in activity at the Kremlin’s 1295th Central Base of Repairs and Storage of Tanks in Arsenyev in Russia’s Far East.
Technicians were reactivating dozens of 1950s-vintage BTR-50 tracked armored personnel carriers and driving them off the yard. “We found 63 BTR-50s at the 1295th which have all been removed and they seem to be in good condition,” analyst Highmarsed
reported.
That’s two whole battalions of vehicles. All-terrain rides for hundreds of Russian troops. But to Highmarsed, there was another, darker implication. “I would expect to see more BTR-50 losses in the future,” the analyst predicted.
Sure enough, the Russians have written off no fewer than 10 BTR-50s that the Oryx intelligence collective
has tallied. The survivors are still in action, however—some sporting new turrets, and most with add-on armor for deflecting the ever-present explosive drones that have made it
extremely dangerous for any Russian vehicle to break cover.
If anything, the “museum pieces”—
as one observer described them—are becoming more common along the 800-mile front line as Russia’s wider war on Ukraine grinds toward its fourth year. But their resurgence may be temporary.
All Russian vehicles are endangered species in a war increasingly dominated by drones.
The BTR-50 is a 15-ton, diesel-fueled armored tractor with two crew and space for up to 20 passengers. It usually packs a heavy machine gun. The BTR-50 entered service in 1954 and, for the next 12 years, was the Soviet army’s main fighting vehicle. BTR-50 crews would haul infantry into battle, protect the soldiers as they dismounted and then support them with its machine gun.
The BTR-50 is lightly-armed and thinly-armored, however. When the heavier, and more heavily-armed, BMP-1 debuted in 1966, thousands of BTR-50s cascaded to second-line units. The BTRs hauled artillery, engineers and anti-aircraft guns until MT-LB tractors began displacing the older vehicles from
those roles, too.
As of late 2022, the Russian army operated just a handful of geriatric BTR-50s. That the Russians held onto a few BTR-50s should come as no surprise. “Russia sees no need to completely change out its inventory of older vehicles, and instead has adopted a hybrid approach towards modernization,” Lester Grau and Charles Bartles
explained in their definitive
The Russian Way of War.
But these operational BTR-50s performed secondary support roles far from any enemy forces. Meanwhile, a few thousand of the old vehicles rusted away in storage. Two years ago, it would have been inconceivable for these surplus BTR-50s to roll into action in Ukraine. But that was before the Russians lost more than 15,000 armored vehicles and other pieces of heavy equipment.
Given that Russian industry
builds maybe 200 BMP-3 fighting vehicles and
90 T-90M tanks annually as well as a few hundred other armored vehicles including BTR-82 wheeled fighting vehicles, the vast majority of the replacement vehicles the Kremlin must generate to make good combat losses unavoidably comes from once-vast stocks of old Cold War equipment.
Three years ago, storage yards held tens of thousands of old tanks, fighting vehicles and other vehicles. But the stocks weren’t infinite. As they began to deplete, the Russians began deploying more civilian-style vehicles for direct assaults on Ukrainian positions: cars, vans, all-terrain vehicles, motorcycles and even electric scooters.
Today, it’s practically routine for some unarmored civilian vehicle packed with terrified Russian infantry to barrel toward Ukrainian lines—likely heading for fiery destruction.
The deployment of civilian vehicles is one sign of stress in Russia’s equipment-generation effort. The continued sightings of up-armored BTR-50s is another. Recent satellite imagery indicates even
deeper stress. In some of what were once the most abundant storage yards, there are no longer any recoverable vehicles. Not even 70-year-old BTR-50s.
That doesn’t mean Russia won’t keep fighting. It
does mean its forces will increasingly fight on foot. Incredibly, foot-borne infantry often fare better than vehicles do under relentless drone attack. The former are fleeting targets. The latter are usually pretty hard to miss.
“Every single time” Russian regiments attempt a vehicle assault, “the result is zero,” one Russian blogger lamented recently in a missive
translated by Estonian analyst WarTranslated. But “infantry, with the support of artillery and drones, slowly but surely take tree line after tree line.”
There’s one thing leg infantry can’t do, however. They can’t exploit breaches in enemy defenses in order to swiftly and deeply penetrate enemy territory. That’s why recent Russian advances have mostly been measured in yards, not miles.
And why the surviving BTR-50s are, despite their advanced age, still a precious commodity for the Russians.