Nizhny Tagil New Main Battle Tank

Is this what it looks like?
A new MBT was developed by V. Potkin's design team in Nizhny Tagil, at the Uralvagonzavod Plant where all the latest Russian tanks except the T-80 were manufactured.

This vehicle is intended to become the new Russian MBT and was planned to enter service in 1994, but due to lack of financing it is still on the testing grounds (according to some reports it has cleared the testing phase around March 1999). As a result, the Russian Army is stuck with the obsolete designs of T-64/T-72/T-80/T-90 line for much longer than it wishes.

The MBT doesn't yet have any lofty name and hides behind some obscure "ob'ekt" designation. In March 2000 the Defense Minister Igor Sergeev, while visiting Nizhny Tagil, said that Russia now "has a new T-95 tank" referring to the MBT being discussed here. It is unclear if this means that the vehicle is finally fielded (as only a fielded vehicle may get T-95 designation), or he just used the term that is sufficiently known in the West to avoid getting into details.

I could find very little about this vehicle, because it is all classified data. Here is the precious little I could gather, thanks mostly to Col. Viktor Mourakhovsky.

I hope that the veil of secrecy will lift a bit and I will learn more details about this MBT.

Until that time, here is an older page on which I was collecting various tidbits of information about this tank in 1998. Since some newspapers were already quick to use the information on that page as a description of T-95, I would like to specifically stress that the information there is obsolete.


This page is © 1998-2000 Sauron's Creations,
with contributions by Viktor Mourakhovsky