From: Transform Ukraine By Douglas Landro / October 12, 2025
Russia builds for the next war even as Ukraine burns the fuel for this one. Europe feels the hum of an invisible conflict edging into the open.
The Day’s Reckoning
October 11, 2025, revealed two wars unfolding at once. In Nizhny Tagil, leaked Uralvagonzavod documents showed Russia preparing for its next conflict—an 80 percent surge in tank production by 2028, with more than a thousand new T-90M2 “Ryvok-1” tanks planned for deployment. In Ufa, Ukraine answered that future with fire, striking the Bashneft-Novoíl refinery 1,400 kilometers from the front—its third hit on Bashkortostan in a month—cutting Russia’s oil output by 21 percent and triggering fuel shortages.
Across Europe, signs of escalation multiplied. Unidentified drones buzzed NATO airfields in Germany and Estonia, Britain expanded surveillance flights along Russia’s borders, and Belarus ordered combat readiness drills. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán launched a petition against EU aid to Ukraine, giving Moscow propaganda it didn’t have to invent.
On the front lines, Russia pushed near Pokrovsk and Velykomykhailivka, launching a mechanized assault near Dobropillya under heavy rain that grounded Ukrainian drones. It was a day of attrition and ambition—one side grinding forward in mud, the other striking deep into the machinery that fuels its enemy’s war.
Forging the Next War
The papers from Uralvagonzavod did not describe a factory—they described a prophecy. Dated, stamped, and quietly confident, the leaked documents from Russia’s largest tank manufacturer outlined a plan that could redraw Europe’s map by the end of the decade. By 2028, T-90 production would surge eighty percent above prewar levels. The new variant, the T-90M2 Ryvok-1—its name meaning “dash” or “breakthrough”—was designed not for this war, but for the one that would follow.
The blueprint read like a timetable of intent. Ten prototype tanks in 2026, a proving run. Four hundred twenty-eight in 2028—one every twenty hours. Over three years, more than eleven hundred new or modernized T-90s would roll from the same factory floors that once seemed exhausted by sanctions. In 2024, Ukraine’s intelligence analysts believed Uralvagonzavod could build no more than seventy a year. The leak revealed a tripling of that rate within three years.
Inside the plant, the secret wasn’t manpower—it was machinery. The new precision CNC systems, imported through a labyrinth of sanctions-dodging middlemen, were European at their core. Western technology was now cutting the armor plates of Russia’s next war machine. Factory engineers trained day and night on the consoles that made the impossible plausible: a fully automated assembly line humming under sanctions meant to silence it.
By Frontelligence Insight’s estimates, Moscow intended to modernize over two thousand tanks between 2026 and 2036—enough to restore its prewar armored strength and field reserves against NATO, not Ukraine. But perhaps the most chilling revelation wasn’t the speed of production. It was the silence of delivery. A Finnish defense official confirmed that almost none of these new tanks had reached the front. Russia was burning its old steel in Ukraine while stacking its new armor for later.
The war that raged across the Donbas had become a rehearsal. Each destroyed T-62 or T-72 bought time for the next generation waiting under canvas in Nizhny Tagil. The Kremlin wasn’t just fighting a war—it was practicing for one that hasn’t yet begun.
The Ghost Fleet Runs Dry
Across the Urals, in the rusting graveyards of Russia’s armored past, the bones of the Soviet Union are disappearing. Satellite imagery released on October 8 showed what no official report ever would: Moscow’s tank reserves are vanishing. In just four months, storage bases once crowded with relics have thinned from 3,106 tanks to 2,478—six hundred twenty-eight pulled from their slumber since summer began.
Voice of Ukraine 