T-90 Tank: A Renamed T-72, India's Bhishma and Clay Bricks in the Armor

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The T-90 came out of a post-Soviet crisis. In 1992 Russia was fielding three incompatible tank families, the T-64, T-72 and T-80, on a collapsing budget. The T-80's gas turbine burned fuel at an unsustainable rate and the tank had suffered heavy losses in the First Chechen War, while the T-72 carried the image of televised losses in Middle Eastern wars. The Kartsev-Venediktov Design Bureau put the T-80's 1A45 fire control system into a T-72B hull, a hybrid called Object 188, and named it the T-90 to escape the T-72's reputation. Protection came in three layers: composite armor, Kontakt-5 or Relikt explosive reactive armor, and the Shtora-1 system, whose glowing infrared dazzlers confuse older guided missiles and which fires smoke when a targeting laser is detected. A three-person crew sits above a 22-round autoloader carousel, keeping the tank just 2.22 meters tall.

India kept the program alive. After Pakistan bought T-80UD tanks from Ukraine, India ordered hundreds of T-90s in 2001 and built them in Avadi as the Bhishma, stripping out the Shtora dazzlers and adding French Thales thermal imagers; it now operates more than 1,200 and has introduced the Bhishma Mark III with DRDO electronics. In Dagestan in 1999 one T-90 reportedly stayed in action after seven RPG hits, and in Syria in 2016 one survived a frontal TOW hit. In Ukraine after 2022, open source trackers documented more than 213 T-90s lost, over 150 of them the T-90M Proryv. Top-attack Javelin and NLAW missiles and roughly $500 FPV drones hit the thin roof above the ammunition carousel, producing the jack-in-the-box effect.

• In April 2023 a T-90A captured in the Kharkiv counteroffensive sat on a flatbed at a Louisiana truck stop, bound for a U.S. proving ground.
• Western tanks keep ammunition behind blast doors with blowout panels, a safety feature the T-90 traded for a lower silhouette.
• The Bhishma is named for an invincible guardian warrior of the Mahabharata.
• Crews report a "disco head" failure in which the turret spins uncontrollably.
• In late 2024 a destroyed T-90M was found with clay construction bricks in its reactive armor slots.