Living off Cold War Leftovers: How the Ukraine War Will Devastate Militaries Worldwide

A Soviet Inheritance

In the years since the Cold War ended, old Soviet-era systems have become symbols of non-Western militaries. T-55s tanks, BMP-1s IFVs, BTR-60s APCs, D-30s howitzers… If one is to look at Africa, Asia, or the Arab world, you’ll find many countries still field these retro heavy arms. This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that knows a bit about Soviet war economy production, which heavily emphasized quantity over quality. The T-54/55, for example, is the most produced tank in history, with an estimated 95,000-100,000 units produced between 1946 and 1985.

BMP-1s stored in the 111th Central Tank Storage and Repair Base, Russia. Source: Instagram.

Today, with the USSR firmly consigned to the dustbin of history, this kit is mostly fielded by poor states that can’t afford to be equipped with modern technology, and whose armies are mostly concerned with either fighting insurgencies or being forever ready to crush internal dissent. For such nations, arming themselves with cheap, “reliable enough” Soviet kit was a no-brainer, particularly in the post-Cold War period when armor could be brought at massive discount from successor states like Russia, Belarus, or Ukraine, who couldn’t maintain the oversized armed forces they inherited from the Soviet Union and wanted to make a quick buck.

Indeed, look closer at the Soviet arms currently in use in Third World countries, and you can make out three rough ‘generations’:

1. Equipment made in the 1950s-’60s, like the T-54/55. Very antique and obsolete and hard to keep running as it’s being phased out in most places and spare parts are hard to come by, requiring cannibalizations.
2. More recent Soviet kit from the 1970s-’80s that’s still in need of modernization, like  the T-72 (both A, M and B variants and derivatives), which were usually manufactured in Soviet times but refurbished in the post-Soviet years.
3. And finally, modern, newly-produced hardware like T-90Ms, which is the most reliable but also the most expensive. As a result there are only a few hundred of these held worldwide.

T-55 tank used by militia men in Afghanistan, 2005. Source: Wikipedia.

Since by 2022 Russia had mostly scrapped the oldest systems of the first ‘generation’ it inherited from the Soviet breakup (e.g. the barely 313 T-54/55s in outdoor storage in prewar Russia), the states fielding this kit were looking forward to acquiring more modern systems. T-55s (a tank whose design started only a little after World War Two ended) would gradually be replaced with T-72Bs - a tank that has also not been in production for over two-and-a-half decades now, but which is still far more modern and up-to-date compared to its predecessor. At this point, there were only a few hundred old systems like T-54/55s, BTR-50s, BTR-60s in Russian storage bases, just enough to supply a few occasional clients.

Today, after over four years of warfare in Ukraine, almost all of those few piecemeal remnants are now gone, leaving nothing with which to fix an old armored vehicle once it breaks down for good.

Of course, this depletion of stockpiles would’ve always happened eventually. But the Ukraine War has accelerated the end of this type of Soviet armament. Today, most of the countries whose armies field these systems on paper may already be unable to actually use them.

A similar process is underway with the more ‘modern’ types of Soviet equipment commonly found in parts of the world. Things like the T-72, BMP-1, BMP-2 and BMP-3, BTR-70 and BTR-80, etc. Plus also some systems made by Russia in the post-Soviet era such as the T-90 or the BMP-3. These, too, have also been severely depleted.

For example, let’s consider the BMP-1 and BMP-2. Some 80,000-90,000 units were produced, and by 2022 Russia had roughly 3,500 in active service (mostly BMP-2) and 7,000 in storage. By 2026, those numbers have been reduced to 1,300 BMP-1s and 800 BMP-2s in service, and 2,000 more in storage. Thousands have been lost in combat and to equipment tear and wear, and many of the ones still in storage are too cannibalized, rusted, or old to ever be repaired.

To keep their many hundreds of active BMPs running, Russia will have to devote all their repair efforts and spare parts just to themselves and exclude foreign clients. These clients, who number in the dozens, will see their own BMPs eventually fall to disrepair and be scrapped as no longer serviceable. For countries habituated to a seemingly-inexhaustible supply of spare parts, this will be a considerable challenge.

How the Russian Invasion of Ukraine Drained the Soviet Legacy Equipment Market

To get a good sense of how decisive a blow the Ukraine War has dealt to the Soviet legacy, we only need look at the numbers. Russia was long the biggest provider of cheap Soviet and post-Soviet equipment, as well as the technical expertise and supplies of spare parts necessary to repair and keep them operative. However, with a minimum of 14,067 pieces of heavy equipment lost or damaged in some way as per Oryx, the war has devastated its military reserves of hardware, stored in depots all over its territory. With them has gone Russia’s ability to service its clients’ purchases.

The importance of these services can be found in the story of Assad’s Syria. Throughout the decade-and-a-half-long civil war, the Assadist army suffered untold equipment losses, most critically armored vehicles. Despite having started the war with one of the biggest tank fleets on paper in the world, Syrian Arab Army maintenance standards were lacking and many systems turned out to be inoperable.

Former Russian T-62s of the Libyan National Army (LNA), 2021. Source X.

Russia, Assad’s most important ally along with Iran, provided entire shiploads of spare parts and replacement vehicles just to keep the Assad regime’s combat capabilities afloat. It was during this time that Russia started to overhaul and repair old T-62 tanks in storage, precisely to have easy and cheap armor to provide to allies in these kinds of situations (and also to keep a potential system to equip reservist units in case of a mobilization). 2022 would prove this was a good, long-term thinking. A similar case happened with Libya from 2016 onwards during its own civil war, with Russian backing one of the conflicting sides.

We can say confidently that such cases will never happen again. In order to keep their own armored vehicles operating after so many losses in Ukraine, the Russians have had to scrape many of their storage boneyards dry. This has created a threat for all the countries that have come to rely on easy access to Soviet legacy spare parts. Multiple friendly regimes have in recent years gotten Russian-refurbished, Soviet-made equipment: Venezuela, Nicaragua, Vietnam, Uganda, Algeria, India, Laos, Myanmar, Serbia… the list goes on. What had once seemed a cheap alternative to Western-made kit (not to mention a good way to cozy up to Moscow), now increasingly appears to be a liability.

The Situation for Russia and its Sphere of Influence

Right up to 2022, Russia was still making arms deals with countries all over the world. However, the start of the war and the ever increasing toll it took on Russian army equipment meant that foreign orders for the Russian arms industry were mostly put on hold. We even saw the Kremlin requisitioning some systems built for foreign clients, such as the Indian T-90S tanks that were in Uralvagongozavod at the start of the war and that the Russian army subsequently deployed in Ukraine, or the Indian-ordered S-400 air defense systems which Russia admitted it would not be able to deliver on time because it needed all air defense production for its war effort.

Destroyed Russian T-90A in Ukraine, 2022. Likely a tank from the Indian Army that was waiting in UVZ for overhaul when the invasion started and was pressed into Russian service. Source X.

On top of that, there’s another, related problem. Of the ‘generations’ of Soviet/Russian military equipment we discussed earlier, the third, newest one is made up of Russian-manufactured systems, not Soviet ones refurbished and modernized by contemporary Russia. The underlying problem with this generation is that, unlike the inherited Soviet kit that Russia could afford to sell abroad at low prices or even gift to friendly states, these are newly produced, and therefore incur a considerable expense to the Russian state budget. Simply put, many Russian client states are just too poor to afford to arm themselves with this sort of heavy equipment.

For a current example, look to Russia’s Sahel allies. Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger don’t have robust enough economies to equip themselves with battalions of T-90Ms, or BMP-3s and modernize their air forces with Ka-52 gunships and Su-35s fighter jets. True enough, recently-modernized Russian systems such as BTR-82s or T-72B3 have been sighted in Mali, but most likely these are employed by the Russian PMC mercenaries supporting the junta in its counterinsurgency campaign, and in any case have never amounted to more than a few dozen pieces.

Russian T-72B3 tank recently spotted in Mali. Source: X.

This shrinking base of potential buyers is visible when we track Russian foreign sales since the start of the Ukraine War. While still the third-largest arms exporter worldwide, Russia’s share of global arms sales fell from 21% in 2016-20 to 6.8% in 2021-25 according to SIPRI, with arms exports decreasing 64% between the two periods. Most of the remaining revenue Russia gets is from deals with a small set of mid-sized to large states that can afford to buy expensive equipment in significant amounts (mainly India, Algeria, Vietnam, Belarus, North Korea, China, and Iran).

But there’s also the issue that some of these states are in turn producers of copies and spare parts for Soviet legacy equipment, which in turn creates competition for Russia. Iran is now the world’s main supplier of 130mm ammo for Soviet-made M-46 howitzers, still in use in many countries (including Russia itself, which for the past two years has been tapping their M-46 stockpiles hard as artillery losses mount). More Chinese-designed and made equipment, such as combat vehicles, have been seen in Russian-leaning states in Africa, such as the Sahel countries. With the collapse of Russian military sales also comes the diminishment of Russian soft power and influence. No longer able to reliably provide client regimes with the tools to stay in power via arming their forces with cheap, Soviet-era hardware, the Kremlin is discovering that these regimes are now looking elsewhere.

Truck-based old 130mm Soviet M-46 howitzers in service with the Syrian Arab Army, 2010s. Source: X.

A case in point is Angola. While Luanda used to be Russia’s largest arms client in sub-Saharan Africa, since late-2022 the country has been openly trying to part ways with the Russian arms industry, in the hopes of lessening its dependency on Russian military equipment. India, the biggest importer of Russian military hardware (totalling some 34% of all Russian military sales on average), has been trying to do the same in recent years, improving their own defense industrial base, and even acquiring licenses to produce as much Russian kit in-house as possible, as their huge stockpiles of Soviet/Russian equipment will prove hard to phase out in the short/medium-term. Meanwhile Belarus, a country usually considered a vassal state of Putin’s Russia, has been gradually doing more deals with the Chinese arms industry. EU and US sanctions on Russian trade have undoubtedly played a hand in this, but there’s no ignoring the bigger picture.

The Situation for Ukraine and its Allies

Russia and its clients aren’t the only ones suffering as Soviet kit runs out. Ukraine and its allies, mainly Eastern European states, face an identical situation. As one can imagine, Ukraine - while also inheriting considerable stockpiles of military equipment from the USSR, and still maintaining several thousand pieces in storage come 2022 - has by now depleted its depots of most pieces that are not obsolete or beyond repair. It’s no wonder that many of the most recent Ukrainian brigades were issued with ancient, mostly-useless armored vehicles such as MT-LBUs or BRDM-2s, as there’s little else left for second-rate formations. Even T-64s, the Soviet workhorse of the Ukrainian tank fleet, of which Ukraine held the biggest fleet in the world, are slowly dwindling into extinction.

MT-LBu-based ersatz ‘APCs’ in service with Ukraine, 2023. Lack of better, more modern heavy equipment has forced Ukraine to repeatedly equip new brigades with obsolete systems to avoid a complete lack of mechanization. Source: *Militarnyi*.

Despite a ban on satellite imagery over Ukraine after the first year of the war, the impacts seen on storage sites in that short period were notable. Outdoor stockpiles went down from 3,378 armored vehicles to 2,738, and artillery stockpiles from 1,630 pieces to 1,387. And that’s just comparing images from 2022 and early-2023. T-64s and T-72s just in outdoor storages dropped in these months from 308 to 222 (unlike Russia, Ukraine stored most of its reserve equipment inside sheds and garages; it’s estimated that Ukraine started the war with up to 600 T-64s just in storage).

Former Warsaw Pact member states, such as Poland, the Czech Republic, or Romania, have contributed to keeping Ukraine’s Soviet-reliant forces running, as Western-made, NATO standard kit just isn’t available in the numbers required to reequip the Ukrainian military. It’s a known fact that these countries have given Ukraine most of their Soviet-era equipment and are now in the process of rearming themselves with up-to-date Western kit. As such, only a few hundred pieces of Soviet legacy hardware are left in Eastern Europe, mainly in Bulgaria (which may have the biggest remaining reserve stockpile, with up to 200 T-72Ms, and several more hundred BTR-60/70s, 2S1 Govdizkas, MT-LBs and BRDM-2s) and Poland (which still has hundreds of BMP-1s, but for the most part has given everything else from the Warsaw Pact era to Ukraine).

But even these stocks won’t last long once these countries completely modernize their armed forces and give the remaining old systems to Ukraine. In a high intensity, peer war such as this, a few hundred pieces of equipment won’t be a miracle maker, but simply a means by which to replenish what has been lost. It's worth remembering that many Ukrainian brigades formed during the war suffer from an utter lack of mechanization.

Even stocks from private companies dried up during the war, as European governments and NGOs bought these to help the Ukrainian cause. Nowadays little is left, and most of it likely isn’t worth the excessive price that private companies charge for the pieces they hold.

Remaining heavy equipment in the hands of private companies in Europe, based on recent OSINT research, including both Soviet and NATO standard equipment. Leftovers are too small in numbers to be relevant. Source: X.

As with Russia, there is therefore a growing shortage of spare parts and replacements for the huge Soviet fleet that has kept the Ukrainian army motorized. For now, the West has only delivered light armored vehicles such as infantry mobility vehicles (IMVs) or mine-resistant ambush protected vehicles (MRAPs) in decent amounts, but not heavier stuff like tanks or IFVs. Cannibalization won’t keep the Soviet-era hardware running forever on either side of the war.

Nor can Western states try to reverse-engineer Soviet equipment to create new stockpiles, at least not if they wish to be sensible about how they spend their money. Recently the Slovak company STV Group announced it had been contracted by an undisclosed client (most likely Ukraine) to produce 100 new BMP-1 hulls from scratch. It was speculated that this was to keep the huge Ukrainian BMP fleet running, but it’s actually far-more likely that there’s no new production at all, given the steep costs of setting up a new production line for a completely outclassed, ancient IFV. According to unverified information, what’s more likely is that what’s passed off as new production is actually just a way to circumvent bans to export them to Ukraine from the previous owner. Starting a new production line, in short, would’ve been both expensive and, ultimately, pointless.

Living off Cold War Leftovers

In the end, the key takeaway from this is that a huge chunk of the world has been living off Cold War-era military production, and now that era is over. And, despite this article focusing on the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, the truth goes far beyond Soviet equipment. The West likewise spent the three-and-a-half decades after the end of the Cold War enjoying the peace dividend and not investing in new military hardware. What little production of heavy equipment was still in place in Europe in February 2022 amounted to little more than artisan-like work, the heavy-armor equivalent of a small village shop that still hand carves children’s toys. Even the US depended for many years on prebuilt Abram tank hulls from the ‘90s, preferring to merely refurbish and modernize those instead of manufacturing new ones.

In the case of Soviet products, what can be expected is that eventually wear and tear and combat attrition will take a growing toll on the remaining equipment, reducing it in size little by little until Ukraine, Russia, and other states scrap what pieces are still working and stick to new types of equipment, whether they be NATO or post-Soviet standard. Meanwhile, a lot of developing states will be left with no easy means to replenish their militaries’ heavy equipment. And while this piece has focused on armored vehicles (given it is the author’s expertise), this will also affect everything from air defense to artillery and missiles.

In short, much of the world is now entering a strange new era. One in which the stockpiled systems that sustained countless armies are finally disappearing. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. It is only now, thirty-five years later, that its final legacy is at last starting to dry up.