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RUSSIA RUSSIA'S MILITARY STRENGTH ... The Military Show Russia Is Running Out of Tanks… and Putin Is POWERLESS to Stop It PLAY YOUTUBE VIDEO Original article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cf4KWi4k5Rc
Russia Is Running Out of Tanks… and Putin Is POWERLESS to Stop It The Military Show Nov 19, 2025 1.92M subscribers ... 177,493 views ... 4.5K likes #themilitaryshow #militarystrategy #militarydevelopments Russia’s tanks were supposed to bring a quick victory in Ukraine. Instead, years of brutal losses, crippling sanctions, and collapsing production have left the Kremlin’s armored forces in crisis. With manufacturers cutting staff, components running dry, and Ukraine’s drones destroying everything Russia sends to the front, Moscow is running out of time—and tanks. Now the question isn’t how many Russia can build, but whether it can build any at all. The breaking point is coming… Support us directly as we bring you independent, up-to-date reporting on military news and global conflicts by clicking here: / @themilitaryshow #militarystrategy #militarydevelopments #militaryanalysis #themilitaryshow SOURCES: https://pastebin.com/efnRGY1S How this was made Auto-dubbed Audio tracks for some languages were automatically generated. Learn more Peter Burgess COMMENTARY Peter Burgess Transcript 0:00 Russia’s tanks were supposed to be the difference maker in the Ukraine war. And if they had done what Russia expected them to do, we would barely have seen a war at all. The metal monstrosities were supposed to roll into Ukraine in their thousands, destroying their enemy’s resistance while paving the way for a complete takeover. Almost four years into the Ukraine war, it’s clear that a Russian victory hasn’t happened. Instead, Russia has spent the entire war burning through its tank stockpiles as Ukraine’s missiles and drones destroy everything that is sent onto its territory. Time is u p. Russia is running out of tanks, and Putin is powerless to stop it. And it’s all happening because of the combination of Russia’s massive tank losses and the stress that has been placed on the Russian economy due to Putin’s multi-year war that was meant to be over in a matter of weeks. That’s according to Euromaidan Press, which published an article on November 18 that highlighted the dreadful state of Russian tank production, along with the impact that it’s having on Russia’s soldiers on the front lines. In a nutshell, tank production in Russia is down. It’s so down that the country has seen about a 33% reduction in its deliveries 1:05 of T-90M and T-72B3 tanks compared with last winter. And the main reason for that reduction is that Russia’s tank manufacturers can no longer afford to maintain the workforces that they need to meet the demands of the country’s military. This isn’t a case of these manufacturers not being able to hire more people. They’re laying off the people that they already have. These layoffs were reported by Reuters on November 7. The outlet focused on a company named Uralvagonzavod, or UVZ, which is one of Russia’s largest tank and freight railcar manufacturers. Both are important products, given that Russia’s Ukraine war strategy relies heavily on tanks and trains. However, this massive manufacturer has been forced into a “restructuring” of its operations that amounts to the firing of up to 10% of its employees. This is the company that is responsible for building Russia’s supposedly best-in-class T-90M battle tanks, and it has also been heavily involved in modernization efforts that have seen it make Russia’s Soviet-era T-72s more usable in Ukraine. 2:04 UVZ didn’t announce these layoffs. Rather, they were discovered thanks to an internal memo leaking to a Russian news outlet named E1, Reuters reported. Russia wanted to get away with this reduction in its tank workforce without anybody knowing about it. That hasn’t worked out the way Vladimir Putin would have wanted it to. Reuters adds that UVZ is controlled by one of Putin’s allies, and that some of its staff had already been moved onto four-day workweeks as the company attempts to get a grip on spiraling costs and a decline in demand for its freight railcars. Ukraine may have had something to do with that. Thanks to Ukraine’s rampant refinery strikes since the summer, Russia has extended its ban on gasoline exports and restricted diesel shipments. These are both products that trains would have carried across the country, so a reduction in demand, coupled with an overall reduction related to other cargo, has left UVZ scrambling for business at a time when it should have plenty. The leaked documents revealed that UVZ plans to cut 10% of its workforce by February 2026, and that it will also suspend new hiring. 3:01 When pressed for a statement about the document by Reuters, the company gave a generic response. “In the current environment, like any other enterprise, UVZ is carrying out restructuring, primarily aimed at optimizing administrative and management expenses,” UVZ said. Translation: We can’t afford to operate at th e required level. United24 Media followed up on the Reuters report, revealing that it had received information from UVZ staff that the proposed cuts could run deeper than even the leaked documents reveal. One unnamed employee said, “According to our information, the reduction for most divisions is up to 50% of their established headcount. As a result, able-bodied, highly qualified specialists are losing their jobs.” That’s an interesting way of stating things. The implication here is that it’s not just the rank-and-file in UVZ’s massive manufacturing operation that are under threat. Some of the company’s most talented engineers and employees may find their heads on the chopping block. Militarnyi adds that, in addition to the lower orders for freight railcars, UVZ may also be laboring under a general lack of funding and a reduction in other military orders, all of which can be traced back to Russia’s faltering wartime 4:03 economy. By February, UVZ will be 10% lighter when it comes to employees. And while that situation promises to have an impact on Russian tank production, and the shortages that the country is already dealing with, UVZ isn’t exactly doing well in the present, either. The 33% reduction in production that we mentioned at the beginning of this video relates to UVZ's deliveries of T-90Ms and T-72B3 battle tanks, Euromaidan Press reports. That means Russia’s main tank manufacturer has built far fewer tanks than it did in the winter of 2024, and the situation isn’t going to get better. Fewer workers feed into a cycle that is already slowly destroying the company from the inside, as the outlet explains. “It's a chain reaction: without foreign components, upgrades stall; without upgrades, contracts shrink; and without new contracts, entire divisions begin to shut down,” Euromaidan Press reports. The result of all of this is simple: Russia’s weakening armored fleets are about to get a whole lot weaker. And those fleets were already struggling massively in Ukraine to begin with. Thanks to Ukraine’s missiles, and especially its drones, Russian tanks 5:04 are being destroyed in their thousands across the Ukrainian battlefield. The Ukrainian Ministry of Finance says that Russia has lost a staggering 11,355 of its tanks between Putin’s February 24, 2022, launch of the Ukraine invasion and November 18, 2025. After roughly 44 months of war, that means Russia has been losing tanks at a rate of about 258 per month. That is an insane rate of tank attrition. And it’s a testament to Ukraine’s drones, which have been able to come up with answers for dealing with every Russian tank up to and including the supposedly fearsome T-90M. In September, the National Security Journal reported that roughly 200 of Russia’s T-90s have been destroyed, damaged, abandoned or captured in Ukraine, which is a remarkable number, given that this tank is meant to be the best main battle tank in the world. Ukraine having solutions for taking the T-90 down means that the Soviet-era stock that makes up the majority of Russia’s tank fleet never stood a chance. All of this points to Russia’s tank losses already being a major 6:02 reason for its shortage. With the 10% reduction in UVZ staff, that shortage is going to get much worse. Euromaidan Press offers a basic example of how, noting that losing so many staff could lead to UVZ making or repairing between 25 and 30 fewer tanks than it currently does per month. Bear in mind that this is a company that was already well behind its deadlines for deliveries even before the news of its impending layoffs broke. While that shortfall might not seem like much at first glance, it translates into over 300 fewer tanks heading into Ukraine annually. The outlet even speculates that UVZ losing as many as 50% of its employees in some divisions could push its tank production back down to pre-war levels, which would mean that Putin’s two-year transformation of Russia into a wartime economy would be totally reversed. We were already seeing plenty of signs that Russia was running out of tanks before learning the news that one of its largest manufacturers will be losing so many of its employees. In September, Important Stories published an interesting article stating that Russia is losing less equipment now 7:01 than it was earlier in the Ukraine war. The reason why isn’t what you might expect. Russia hasn’t suddenly become more adept at tackling Ukraine’s drones, and it’s certainly not replacing its lost tanks and other armor with equipment that is stronger and less vulnerable to Ukraine’s weapons. It's much simpler than that. Russia is losing less equipment because it doesn’t have as much equipment as it used to have. More and more often, Russia is attacking without armor, or attacking with such limited amounts of armor that you can barely call what it’s doing a mechanized assault. Important Stories describes one common variant of Russia’s formerly tank-heavy assaults, noting that Russia will often deploy just one tank and one armored personnel carrier or infantry fighting vehicle to lead a column. That armor will be tailed by soldiers riding in civilian vehicles or on motorcycles. The latter are harder for Ukraine to hit than the much larger tanks, but they lack any sort of protection. One anonymous Russian military expert who spoke to the outlet also revealed that Russia isn’t using its tanks for breakthroughs anymore. Its tanks have devolved from being serious combat threats into personnel carriers. “For the Russians, 8:02 equipment is not the main thing. They don’t care if it gets burned. What matters to them is getting the infantry to the right spot,” the Russian officer said. There is an obvious tank shortage going on. If there wasn’t, Russia wouldn’t have changed its tactics from deploying massive mechanized columns to sending one, or even no, tanks, into assaults. On November 16, just days after the revelation of UVZ’s personnel problems, United24 Media said that Russia has started to equip more of its armored units with T-90Ms and T-80BVMs. That doesn’t make sense. If Russia is running out of tanks, how could it be sending these newer tanks into Ukraine? First, reduced production doesn’t mean no production. Russia is still building new tanks, even as one of its leading tank-makers cuts employees. Second, the number of new tanks that Russia is sending into Ukraine is nowhere near enough to cover its losses. The outlet points out that UVZ is building around 250 T-90Ms annually, which is a number that may decline given its pending staff layoffs. Another 150 T-80s are being built, giving Russia an annual total of 400 new tanks. Now, 9:01 remember the average monthly tank losses that we shared earlier. That average is 258 per month, or a little over 3,000 per year. And though the 2025 average may be lower than 258 losses due to Russia deploying fewer tanks overall, the takeaway is the same. Russia isn’t building enough tanks to replace those that it’s losing. Eventually, that disparity between new and destroyed is going to leave it with practically no armor to field in Ukraine. In that situation, the news that UVZ is going to be cutting employees, and thus reducing tank production, couldn’t have come at a worse time for Putin. And there’s nothing that Russia’s president can do to stop the rot, as much as he might want to. UVZ, along with Russia’s other tank manufacturers, is state-controlled, even if it's not necessarily state-owned. That means they’re also reliant on state money, which Putin has been able to pump into Russia’s wartime manufacturers for the last couple of years. That cycle of state investment enabling production is what is going to topple Putin’s goal of getting more tanks. Russia just doesn’t have the money it needs to fully fund companies like UVZ anymore. Ukraine 10:01 has played a huge part in creating Russia’s most recent economic woes, as the Atlantic Council revealed in an October 21 article. It pointed out that the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is predicting that Russia faces a budget deficit of $100 billion in 2026, which is practically unheard of in modern Russia. Even U.S. President Donald Trump has claimed that the Russian economy is set to collapse as Russia labors under a gasoline shortage that is the result of Ukraine’s constant refinery strikes. That fuel crisis is unlikely to be resolved anytime soon, the Atlantic Council says, which means that Russia won’t be able to generate as much revenue as it has in the past from its taxes on refined oil product sales. Less money from taxes also means less money to fund the manufacture of tanks, which is likely the reason why UVZ is having to let employees go due to low demand. Russia’s industrial situation is now so bad that the Kremlin has raised Russia’s value-added tax rate from 20% to 22%. In other words, the Russian people are now expected to pay more for goods and services to fill the gaping hole in Russia’s wartime finances. “Ukraine’s 11:04 deep strikes have exposed Putin’s Achilles heel and have helped demonstrate that the Russian economy is far more fragile than many in Moscow would like us to believe,” the Atlantic Council writes. And the impact of those strikes is having such far-reaching effects on Russia’s economy that it’s not just Russia no longer having the fuel it needs to operate its tanks that Putin has to worry about. Russia no longer has the money to build more, at least not at the required rate. The Kyiv Independent also says that Russia is running out of money in a November 10 report. Specifically, it quotes Russian opposition politician Vladimir Milov, who says, “To keep (Russia's) military machine running like this, a lot more money is needed — and there simply is not any.” Russia’s budget deficit is only going to keep growing the longer that Putin attempts to sustain his war, and that just feeds into the cycle that we already see. Less money in means less money spent. When money isn’t being spent, Russia can’t afford the tanks it needs. Companies like UVZ have to make layoffs, which also means they can no longer service larger contracts. Right now, Russia’s 12:02 National Wealth Fund, which is the country’s main source of liquid cash, is down to $50 billion, which is already $20 billion less than what Russia expected to have by the end of 2025. That find isn’t going to last forever. Russia will run out of tanks entirely when that fund dries up. There’s more. Coming back to UVZ, a 10% reduction in staff numbers doesn’t amount to the total closure of its manufacturing facilities. Rus. Business News estimates that the company has 54,000 employees, though it isn’t clear when this figure dates from or even if it is accurate. UVZ doesn’t publicly disclose how many employees it has. Assuming the 10% cut rate is correct, along with this employee count, that will still mean that UVZ has 48,600 employees come February. However, those employees will have heavier workloads, and they’ll be dealing with another economic issue that has severely limited Russia’s ability to build the tanks that it needs: Western sanctions. Even if the plant still has workers, Euromaidan Press says, sanctions have limited the imported electronics, machine tools, and alloys that allow those workers to build more tanks. “As sanctions 13:03 continue to bite, the cost of replacement parts and foreign components has skyrocketed, forcing factories to idle production lines they can no longer afford to operate,” the outlet reports. “In many cases, layoffs are a disguised form of shutdown, a way to quietly freeze activity without admitting bankruptcy.” So, what we’re seeing at UVZ isn’t a temporary setback. It’s a shadow shutdown, and it’s only going to get worse for the company. Russia isn’t going to magically find new sources of revenue, and the West isn’t going to relieve its sanctions pressure. If anything, sanctions are going to hit Russia even harder in the coming months, especially amidst news that Trump has approved a U.S. sanction bill that could hit Russia’s international customers with 500% tariffs. You can find out more about that bill and the impact it might have in our video. These types of sanctions, though not directly related to tank parts, are designed to close the many loopholes in existing sanctions that Putin has been able to exploit throughout the Ukraine war. As the Royal United Services Institute points out, Russia has continued to buy the tank components it needs, albeit at inflated prices, from third countries that purchase those components legitimately and 14:04 then sell them on to Russia. With more sanctions pressure targeting the countries that are doing business with Russia, comes two potential outcomes. Either those countries stop buying from and selling to Russia, which would limit Russia's ability to purchase the parts it needs for its tanks even more. Or, those countries charge even higher markups for the parts they sell, which we’ve already established is a very bad thing for a Russian economy that is running out of money. Sanctions are also affecting more than Russia’s tank production. As Euromaidan Press notes, Russia is struggling with a labor shortage across all industries, along with components plants that are being forced to shut down due to a lack of funds, a lack of workers, or both. Russia has a labor gap of five million workers across its key industries, and that gap is growing now that its major war economy companies can’t afford to keep employees, never mind hire new ones. Components plants in Tula and Bryansk have had to close their doors, albeit temporarily, due to unpaid contracts and a lack of the parts needed. In Izhevsk, workers have reported wage delays running up to two months. And 15:04 plants that once operated for 24 hours per day are reducing their daily hours to as few as two, all because there is no more money, and the parts needed to build components aren’t available. In short, Russia’s once overheated wartime economy is visibly cooling, Euromaidan Press says. The Moscow Times supports this viewpoint in an October 24 article, where it reveals that Russia’s defense industry is showing signs of slowdown following several years of growth. “Production of 'fabricated metal products,' which surged 26.4% in 2023 and 31.6% in 2024, dropped 1.6% year-on-year in September after growing 21.2% in August,” the outlet reveals. “Output of 'other transport equipment' — a category that includes tanks and armored vehicles — slowed sharply to 6% year-on-year growth in September from 61.2% the previous month.' Interestingly, a November 10 report by the U.K. Defense Journal also reveals that NATO is collectively making more ammunition than Russia, which is both a sign that NATO is making more and a sign that 16:02 Russia is making less. What is Putin to make of all of this? His transformation of Russia into a wartime economy relied on the idea that Russia would win the Ukraine war by now. It hasn’t. Now, the money has run out, the sanctions are only getting harsher, and Russia’s manufacturers are struggling. It’s no longer a question of how many tanks Russia can send into Ukraine. It’s whether Russia will even have any tanks left within the next few months. The country has hit its limit. And there’s nothing that Putin can do to change that. Still, at least Russia can rely on allies like North Korea to continue providing ammunition, even if the tank supplies run dry. That used to be the case. But Kim has fooled Putin, as North Korea is delivering rotting ammo to Russia that is backfiring on Putin’s troops. Russia is quickly running out of options for keeping its war machine churning, as you’ll learn if you watch our video. And if you enjoyed this video, be sure to subscribe to The Military Show for more videos examining Russia’s tank situation.

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