Sudan To Receive 170 T-72 Tanks From Russia

Russia and Sudan have agreed the delivery of the MBTs. Sudan is planned to receive 150 T-72 tanks at an early date. The rest 20 are supposed to be delivered as a source of spare parts for the first batch.

 Khartoum will get the excess T-72 MBTs, Izvestia said. The relevant works on the preparation of the combat vehicles delivery to Sudan have already started, a source in the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) told Izvestia newspaper.

"[Moscow and Khartoum have been discussing the issue since 2011; the final agreement was reached at the Army 2016 military-technical forum held outside Moscow in September 2016. Therefore, [Russia] is planning to deliver 170 excess T-72 tanks to Sudan," the source told Izvestia.

According to him, Khartoum will receive 150 stored T-72s and 20 tanks to be cannibalized. "The MBTs to be delivered to Sudan will be combat-ready. However, [Khartoum] decided to acquire an early variant of T-72 not armed with anti-tank guided missiles [ATGM]," the source said.

According to several defense analysts, the Sudanese armour units are not weak. In 2010-2013, the country’s Armed Forces took the delivery of 130 T-72AV and 60 T-55A MBTs supplied by the Ukrainian SpetsTekhnoEksport company.

The T-72AV tank is a variant of the basic T-72A MBT equipped with the Kontakt-1 explosive reactive armour (ERA) developed by NII Stali (now a subsidiary of the Tractor Plants Concern). T-72AV has a full length of 9,530 mm, a hull length of 6,860 mm, a width of 3,460 mm, a height of 2,190 mm, a clearance of 470 mm, a crew of three tankers, a maximum road speed of 60 km/h and an operational range of 700 km.

The tank is armed with a 125 mm 2A46M smoothbore gun, a 7.62 mm Kalashnikov PKT coaxial machinegun, and a 12.7 mm NSVT roof-mounted anti-aircraft (AA) heavy machinegun.