Kyiv Armored Vehicles Plant, on the eastern edge of the Ukrainian capital, has since the fall of the Soviet Union been used mainly as a storage site for the surplus arsenal of tanks that Ukraine inherited when the Soviet Union broke apart in 1991.
According to experts, Ukraine inherited as many as 7,000 of the more than 50,000 tanks the Soviet Union possessed at the time of its demise. Unable to pay for the maintenance of the war machines, the excess tanks were places in storage sites like the one at Kyiv Armored Vehicles Plant and at other sites dotted around the country, to wait for “better times.”
They are still there.
