[Music] one of the most important factors in if and how long Russia can sustain its war effort is in something you probably never heard of before btzs that in Russian is short for tank repair factories as the name implies they take vehicles in poor condition repair and refurbish them turning them into operational Vehicles again so as you might imagine this is where bottleneck can arise you could have an infinite number of tanks and storage but if you can't get them into working condition to meet the demand on the battlefield then it doesn't matter and you're
going to begin facing increasing shortages so to see whether that is an issue Russia is and will be facing we will take a deep dive into these sites and while here you're getting a full accounting of these btzs what you're not getting is a total accounting of the news that is unless you're using our sponsor this week ground news real quick there are a website and app that gathers related articles from thous thousand of sources putting them together in one place so you can compare how different Outlets cover the same story and each story comes
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again ground news again these ptzs are extremely important which is why one of the first things Russia did early on in the war was to build new and expand existing repair plant at these sites they do everything from repairing major damage to vehicles that can't be repaired on the field or in the case we're focused on overhauling existing vehicles from storage and making them operational again this can include being completely stripped down installing new parts even upgrading equipment and finally getting into an operational vehicle in an ideal world one tank or other type of vehicle
would enter necessary repairs would be made and then one operational vehicle would result but complicating this is just how many types of vehicle Russia has for example in the last 60-ish years for main battle tanks they've had the t62 t64 t72 t80 and T90 while in the same time frame the US just had the M60 and the M1 ABS that puts a real strain on Logistics and a need for a much wider array of spare parts so realistically that can mean an average of two or three vehicles are brought in ripping parts from some just
to make one finished operational vehicle and you can see this just looking at many of these btzs there are just huge fields of vehicles sitting outside like a scrapyard most will likely never be made operational just to use when they need to get parts this makes it really difficult to analyze we could just count the numbers over the years which we actually did also huge thanks to JPY here for counting all the satellite imagery I sent him and this here is a simplified version behind each of these numbers he went further and identified each type
condition and location of each it'd be impossible to fit all that information into one graphic I mean this one alone already got way too complicated the problem is by just looking at this it only gives you an idea of what's changed as you can see in the last two columns we have a total change than an average change per year it's great but it doesn't give us any particular insight to how many they're repairing per year it does give us a nice number to see how many more vehicles on top of our storage count video
that they have the 3,345 tanks in storage plus these here give us a total of 4,636 however it's really important to note here that a much much higher percentage of these are absolute junk unlike storage bases where the absolute worst conditioned tanks and vehicles are scrapped here at a lot of these btzs they'll hold on to any vehicle in case they might want to use it for spare parts to repair other ones but these numbers also give us trend one major one that stands out is a huge increase in 2023 the afes at the 144th
for example went from 120 to 131 then 304 then back down to 140 the same with the 163rd roughly doubling for 2023 before dropping back down to normal levels overall there was a roughly 50% increase in tanks and other armored fighting vehicles at btzs from 2022 to 2023 and that is actually seen in our total tank and AFV count video there the tank dropped just about 400 in 2022 then in 2023 the next year dropped over 1,300 the reason for this is pretty clear if you've been following the war late 2022 was when things started
going very bad for Russia Ukraine had just taken back huge swats of territory in the har and haran offensives and Russia was forced to do a partial mobilization creating dozens and dozens of new regiments including all the vehicles to go with them but it's also important to know that each btz is different some have been handling more one type of vehicle or another others on repairing battle damage vehicles and some seem to be more for scrapping there's two interesting ones I want to take a closer look at the first is the 103rd as you can
see it's just packed full of Tanks all t-62s as well as a scattering of other afvs starting in 2021 and as we flip Through The Years here you can get a rough sense of the layout where and which vehicles are moving and so on the central area is most active while the area like in the bottom left hasn't moved in years we could zoom in and get an inside look via a few videos that have been posted here we could see a wide array of machinery for every step of the repair process as you'd expect
but it's a fascinating look through each section on the interior of the base on the other hand we get some nice exterior shots of the 61st btz this one is located Southwest of St Petersburg and also opposite of the 103d the 61st by all indications is more for scrapping tanks and vehicles for parts to use at other btzs you can see in the satellite imagery it doesn't have the same large Factory buildings and infrastructure that the 103d has and this base here actually delayed this whole video the image you'll see on Google is half from
20120 and the other half from 2022 I was real lucky to be able to find a provider with 2024 satellite imagery of the base but as you can see the changes are pretty drastic but for all btzs as far as throughput unless you're sitting outside these factories watching every train coming and going and Counting each vehicle it's hard to know for sure backlogs except for that increase in 202 three are not very obvious and it's more likely that tanks and other vehicles would wait at their storage bases until there's space at the BTR Zs before
being sent out so it's not like we're going to see huge parking lots just getting Fuller and Fuller of vehicles but from all available evidence it does seem that Russia is able to keep up with repairing and shipping out replacement Vehicles they got through that huge boost in 2023 and numbers have dropped back down at typical rates but repair times are going to vary greatly depending on the type condition and age of the vehicle and likely start to take longer and longer as they've started to scrape the bottom of the Barrel in storage bases so
Russia still has a decent amount in storage as we know and at least right now they're able to keep up replacing losses but that won't last forever it's just a matter if Ukraine can hold on long enough as they have been before Russia runs out and can't keep up sending Replacements whichever happens it's clear that this will be the last true War fought with Soviet Hardware [Music]
