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Ukraine update: Russia is hitting new records for men and equipment lost as repeated assaults fail [1]

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Date: 2023-02-11  

It’s worth noting that those Russian losses haven’t come in the form we’ve become familiar with after watching months of activity near Bakhmut — small companies of men sent across fields or along streets betweened ruined buildings with little to no armor support. All week long the losses have come in the form of entire armored units blasted to smithereens along roadways. In part this has come because Russia has done what Ukraine refused to do: attempt to assault fortified positions in conditions that meant armor was restricted to traveling along a few narrow roadways. In part it’s because Russia seems to be replicating with its armored forces the tactics that it had “mastered” with infantry — if at first everyone gets killed, just send more.

Ukrainian serviceman near Bakhmut. 10 Feb 2023.

The result of this is that each of these days has come not just with astounding losses of men, but almost equally staggering losses of equipment. Since Tuesday, Ukrainian forces have destroyed 36 Russian tanks. Twenty five tanks were lost in two days. These are unsustainable levels of loss.

Granted, what Russia has seen this week falls well short of the numbers lost in the largest battles of World War II. Over the course of the war, they lost a nearly unbelievable 80,000 tanks. But that was when they were building tanks at a rate of better than 20,000 a year. Their current capacity is estimated at only 200–250 tanks per year.

Here’s another way of thinking of it: In World War II, Russia went through about four years worth of tank production capacity during the four years of the war. In Ukraine, they’ve already burned through over 12 years of production capacity, and that’s assuming the high end of production estimates. If Russia stopped right now, it would take them until 2036 to get their tank number back to where it was the day they rolled into Ukraine.

And there’s another big difference. What happened at Vuhledar and Avdiivka wasn’t a tank-on-tank / man-on-man clash. Ukraine has no comparable losses from these battles. It’s hard to even think of them as battles. They were just instances of Russia slowly driving lines of vehicles and herding terrified men, down long muddy roads, and waiting as artillery picks off those who didn’t already manage to hit a mine. They are entirely one-sided losses.

A line of Russian vehicles at Vuhledar. 9 Feb 2023

At the outset of the invasion, estimates of Russian tanks available—from freshly minted T-90M back to Vietnam era T-62 sitting in fields—were put at around 8,000. But that doesn’t mean Russia had 8,000 tanks ready to go to the front. Many of those tanks were damaged, or had systems so outdated they needed mandatory updates before being brought into the fight. Russia can manage to refit old tanks at a rate of about 600 a year.

Put it all together, assuming that sanctions or shortages don’t interfere, and Russia is estimated to be capable of sending about 20 new tanks and 50 refitted older tanks into Ukraine each month.

If the estimates from the Ukrainian armed forces are correct, Russia is losing an average of 270 tanks each month. Even the verified numbers from Oryx show a rate of loss over 140 tanks per month. Here’s what those losses look like if we take the levels over the first 12 months of fighting and project them out through the end of 2023.

Projected Russian tank losses based on numbers from Ukrainian armed forces and confirmed lost from Oryx

There’s a lot of fudging in this chart. The losses of Russian tanks have been in no sense smooth over this whole period, with big peaks coming during the initial Russian invasion, then again during Ukraine’s counterattack into Kharkiv. The chart also makes it seem as if Russian losses started in January, simply because that’s where I stuck the zero. But you get the idea. Russia has been losing tanks at a high rate since the invasion began, and projecting those rates into the future indicates that Russian losses by the end of the year could be over 6,200 tanks — and that’s if the increased rate seen so far in 2023 doesn’t continue.

Now, factor in Russia’s supposed 8,000 tank stockpile, add 20 new tanks each month along with 50 remanufactured older tanks, drop that on top of losses, and how do things look?

Russia’s stockpile of tanks projected through the end of 2023 using numbers from Ukrainian armed forces and Oryx.

If the losses confirmed by Oryx are the only tanks Russia is losing, then their actual “burn rate” is relatively small. Something like 70 tanks a month. But if the Ukrainian military is accurate in estimating tanks destroyed, Russia is bleeding tanks from their stockpile at a rate of around 200 a month. By the end of this year, fewer than 3,000 will remain out of that 8,000 at the outset.

Which leads to a whole new set of questions. How many of those tanks are really fit for battle, even if they are hauled in for an update? Some number of these tanks are going to be so stripped down, so lacking in basic gear, so damaged, so subjection to both corruption (in the form of theft) and corruption (in the form of rust) that they can’t be salvaged. How many? And perhaps most importantly, just how many tanks can Russia burn in Ukraine if that means leaving the rest of its borders undefended? Now repeat this exercise for infantry fighting vehicles, and armored personnel carriers, and artillery, and helicopters, and people.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/11/2152392/-Ukraine-update-Russia-is-hitting-new-records-for-men-and-equipment-lost-as-repeated-assaults-fail

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