Actually , no.
Foreign Military Studies Office Publications - Russian-Manufactured Armored Vehicle Vulnerability in Urban Combat: The Chechnya Experience
View attachment 75303 View attachment 75304
T-80 of
Russia:
3,144 in active service and around 1,856 in storage in 1995.
3,500 in active service in 1998.
3,058 in active service and 1,442 in stock in 2000.
4,500 in both active service and storage in 2005.
3,044 in active service and 1,456 in storage in 2008
T-80 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hardly a reduction.....
First Chechen War[edit]
T-80B and T-80BV MBTs were never used in Afghanistan in the 1980s, but they were first used during the
First Chechen War. This first real combat experience for T-80 MBTs was unsuccessful, as the tanks were used for capturing cities, a task for which they were not very well suited. The biggest tank losses were suffered during the ill-fated assault on the city of
Grozny. The forces selected to capture Grozny were not prepared for such an operation, while the city was defended by, among others, veterans of the
Soviet War in Afghanistan. The T-80 tanks used in this operation either did not have reactive armour (T-80B) or they were not fitted before the start of the operation (T-80BV), and the T-80 crews lacked sufficient training before the war.
The inexperienced crews had no knowledge of the layout of the city, while the tanks were attacked by RPG teams hidden in cellars and on top of high buildings. The anti-tank fire was directed at the least armoured points of the vehicles. Each destroyed tank received from three to six hits, and each tank was fired at by six or seven
rocket-propelled grenades. A number of vehicles exploded when the autoloader, with vertically placed rounds, was hit: in theory it should have been protected by the road wheel, but, when the tanks got hit on their side armour, the ready-to-use ammunition exploded. Out of all armored vehicles that entered Grozny, 225 were destroyed in the first month alone, representing 10.23% of all the tanks committed to the campaign.
[25] The T-80 performed so poorly that General-Lieutenant A. Galkin, the head of the Armor Directorate, convinced the Minister of Defence after the conflict to never again procure tanks with gas-turbine engines.
[26] After that, T-80 MBTs were never again used to capture cities, and, instead, they supported infantry squads from a safe distance. Defenders of the T-80 point out that the T-72 performed just as badly in urban fighting in Grozny as the T-80 and that there were two mitigating factors: after the breakup of the Soviet Union, poor funding meant no training for new Russian tank crews, and the tank force entering the city had no infantry support, which is considered to be suicidal by many major military strategists of armored warfare.
[24]
From same page.
Russian army is replacing the obsolete T-80 with the battle proven T-72
Actually , no.
Foreign Military Studies Office Publications - Russian-Manufactured Armored Vehicle Vulnerability in Urban Combat: The Chechnya Experience
View attachment 75303 View attachment 75304
Russian T-80s:
3,144 in active service and around 1,856 in storage in 1995.
3,500 in active service in 1998.
3,058 in active service and 1,442 in stock in 2000.
4,500 in both active service and storage in 2005.
3,044 in active service and 1,456 in storage in 2008
T-80 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hardly a reduction since 1995 .....
The Russian Federation has over 5,000 T-72 tanks in use, including around 2,000 in active service and 3,000 in reserves.
T-72 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Clearly, T-72 is proportionally 'in reserve' to a far greater extent
Russia operates 550 T-90A as of 2013
T-90 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Together with T-72 from which it derived, numbers active are still less than T-80
All 4500 T-80 are in storage. None are deployed as it is a battlefield failure.
List of main battle tanks by country - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia