Ukraine needs supplies of armored vehicles from the Western partners.

Volodymyr Zelensky, The President of Ukraine, stated this in an interview with The Economist.

According to him, as a result of the fighting, the number of the armored vehicles of the Defense Forces of Ukraine is decreasing. However, so far none of the partners has agreed to sell tanks and armored personnel carriers to replenish the Ukrainian losses.

Ukraine is primarily interested in Soviet armored vehicles, which are familiar to the Ukrainian military and do not need long to be mastered.

We have already provided a list of military equipment we are looking for. We know what we want, where it is and how much of it we need. Soviet equipment is available. All countries having this equipment have received our letters, Zelensky said.

He noted that despite the heavy losses, the russians still have “thousands of units of military equipment” and they “keep going and going.” The President joked that the russian tanks had formed traffic jams in some of the Ukrainian cities.

Zelensky has publicly raised the topic of armored vehicles to the Western partners several times already.

On March 24th, 2022, while addressing the NATO summit, he noted that the Alliance owned a total of 20,000 tanks. Ukraine is asking for 1% of this amount (ie 200 units).

He repeated the same message in his daily video message on March 27th, 2022:

Only 1% of all NATO aircraft and 1% of all NATO tanks. We’ve already been waiting 31 days. Who is in charge of the Euro-Atlantic community? Is it really still Moscow, because of intimidation?

According to the open data recorded by journalists from the Oryx portal, Ukraine has lost at least 79 tanks and 120 armored personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles of various modifications as of March 28th, 2022. Losses from the russian side that have been confirmed with the pictures include 312 tanks, 599 infantry fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers. At the same time, Ukraine has captured at least 133 tanks as trophies. Mechanized brigades of the Armed Forces and the Territorial Defense Units have already adopted some of them.

Ukraine is primarily interested in T-72 tanks abroad. These tanks are already in service of the Armed Forces and the National Guard of Ukraine. There are also contractors in Ukraine that can service, repair and modernize the T-72 main battle tanks.

The T-72s are still in service at a number of NATO countries: Bulgaria (80), Hungary (30), Poland (738), Slovakia (30), Slovenia (46), Croatia (75), and the Czech Republic (103). The numbers are approximate and taken from the open sources.

In the Czech Republic and Poland, the local enterprises had previously set up the production of these tanks. Poland has also created a national tank based on the T-72, called the PT-91 Twardy.

There are potentially more than 1,000 Soviet T-72 tanks in the NATO countries that could be replaced by Western models in exchange for T-72 supplies to Ukraine.

Ukraine may also be potentially interested in replenishing the losses and arming new BMP-1, BMP-2 and Soviet armored personnel carriers, which are also still widely used in the NATO countries, namely former Warsaw Pact countries.