Could Ukraine’s T-84 Tank Take on the World’s Best in a Fight?

By Charlie Gao,The National Interest

The T-84 Oplot-M is Ukraine’s latest Main Battle Tank. While it hasn’t seen combat service in the Ukrainian military, the type contains many advanced features. But the Oplot is hardly a clean slate design. In many ways, it is simply a highly advanced version of the T-80U main battle tank, one of the most lethal tanks the Soviet Union produced. But how did the T-80U become the T-84?

To understand where the T-84 comes from, it is important to understand its heritage. Like the T-64 and the T-80UD, the T-84 is a product of the Ukrainian Kharkiv Morozov Machine Design Bureau (KhKBM). As such, it draws many design features from the earlier tanks. The roots of the T-84 lie in a 1970s Soviet project to improve the T-64B: the Object 476 “Kedr.” In this project, the seven hundred horsepower 5TDF diesel engine in the T-64 is replaced by the more powerful 6TD engine, and the turret protection is set up in a manner that would become the setup on the T-80U. As the T-80U didn’t use diesel engines, preferring the GTD-series of gas turbine engines, the 6TD went unused on the basic T-80U. However due to some problems [3] and the high cost of the GTD-series of engines (ten times that of the 6TD), a diesel variant of the T-80U was built, called the T-80UD (Object 478B). Introduced in 1985, the T-80UD was one of the best MBTs fielded by the Soviet Army before the dissolution of the union. This tank was the basis on which the Oplot would be built upon.

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The lineage from the T-80UD to the T-84 is clearly traceable, as different variants of the T-80UD for export and versions of the T-84 all use the Object 478 designation. At the time of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, various versions of the T-80UD were being trialed with advanced equipment such as the Prana [7] and Shtora Active Protection Systems (APS). Shtora was fit to the command tank variants of the T-80U, the T-80UK. The Soviets wanted to fit these to the T-80UD as well, so they commissioned a prototype that implemented Shtora and welded turret modules that improved protection. This prototype was called the Object 484, or T-80UDK.

The designers at KhKBM post-dissolution realized that it would be good for business if they rolled all of these advanced features into their own “new” tank. The T-80UD already was an export success, with sales to Pakistan [3]. The process of creating the “new” T-84 began with the upgrading [8] of the 6TD engine. The original 6TD-1 as installed on the T-80UD had a horsepower of around 1000 horsepower. The 6TD-2 upped this to 1200 horsepower, allowing the tank to retain its mobility with the increased weight of additional modules. The welded turret was also incorporated. The research and development to create welded turrets were there prior to the collapse of the union, but at the time, disrupting the production of cast turrets was not seen as a logical tradeoff to switch to welded production. When restarting production after the collapse, no reason was seen not to transition to the superior welded design, which gave better protection, greater upgrade potential of the armor in the future, and increased survivability. The first T-84 “Oplot,” designation Object 478DU2 rolled off the assembly line in the spring of 1995. The only substantive differences from the first T-80UDs were the new welded turrets, standard Shtora installations, and 6TD-2 engines. These changes added two tons of weight to the design, bringing the weight up to forty-eight tons.