The Rate of Russian Loss of Tanks and Gear Has Tripled

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David Axe, respected and experienced military journalist, says Russia is losing a Battalion every day. Losses have tripled during the Ukraine offensive. Russia has 100 understrength battalions. Increased equipment loss is confirmed. There are about 1000 soldiers per battalion.

The Russian army is losing at least a battalion’s worth of vehicles and men a day as twin Ukrainian counteroffensives roll back Russian territorial gains in eastern and southern Ukraine. That’s hundreds of casualties and scores of vehicle write-offs every day.

In just under two weeks of brutal fighting, the Ukrainians have destroyed, badly damaged or captured 1,120 Russian tanks, fighting vehicles, artillery systems, trucks, helicopters, warplanes and drones, according to the Ukrainian general staff. Independent analysts scouring social media for photos and videos have confirmed nearly 400 of the Russian losses.

The rate of Russian casualties and vehicle write-offs doubled then tripled as the Ukrainians launched their counterattacks.

Worse for the Russians, in their faltering defense of the south—and total rout in the east—they’ve failed to inflict heavy losses on the attacking Ukrainian brigades. Rough estimates have the Ukrainians losing one-tenth as many troops and vehicles since Aug. 30.

Worse still, captures account for half the Russian vehicle losses. The Ukrainian army in just the last week and a half has seized enough Russian tanks, fighting vehicles and artillery to equip an entire brigade. In other words, the Ukrainian army actually has more vehicles now than it did before launching its counteroffensives.

And short of a total national mobilization—a move that could spark a political crisis—Russia has run out of easy sources of fresh troops and equipment.

16 thoughts on “The Rate of Russian Loss of Tanks and Gear Has Tripled”

  1. The solution for Russia is to send more able-bodied men to prison where they can be enticed to join the army. Russians fleeing the country could be arrested at check-in gates. What kind of strong man is Putin?

  2. Ah Russia, Ukraine’s largest weapon supplier…
    and that isn’t a joke either…

    BUUUT, it’s been implied that the Kharkiv area had more poorly trained/conscript soldiers and was more undermanned, so that was an easier area to attack and rout. Khearson is looking to be a tougher fight though.

    Oryx’s counting abacus is clacking so fast it’s turning into a EDM beat.

    https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-documenting-equipment.html

    https://twitter.com/oryxspioenkop

    Oryx is generally considered to be a reliable counter of OSINT visually confirmed combat losses, previously covering Syria, and now covering russia/ukraine. He’s also covering the Armenia/Azerbaijan conflict a bit too now.

    Plus there’s that weird referendum thing in Georgia about waging war against Russia to recover their invaded land, but that looks like a feint by that government by assuming poor voter turnout, due to voter apathy from being unable to change government.

    Finally Armenia cutting diplomatic relations with Iran in under 24 hours due to an extremely heavy cyber attack, with some people openly wondering if Armenia is considering triggering NATO article 5…

    • Apparently former USSR republics getting into border scuffles is spreading like a contagion. Now Kyrgyzstan-Tajikistan border incidents are occurring.

  3. There is a lot of propaganda and it is impossible to know what exact losses are from either side.

    What has changed in this war though, is for the first time, Russia has attacked critical Ukrainian infrastructure. We did this first up when we went into Iraq and for the life of me I could not understand why Russia did not do this on Day 1 of this war. They have done so now and it will be interesting to see what else they’ll target.

      • indeed , special operation should stay SPECIAL.
        Especially in the historical context of the 2nd largest army, becoming quickly 10th in rank. (still a respectable rank)

    • Russia sold the war on the lie that it was a limited special military operation and they were going in to save their bretheren in eastern Ukraine from nazis or some such nonsense. They expected to be receieved the way Ukrainians were when they liberated the Kharkiv region, with flowers, hugs and people standing along the roads cheering for their liberators.

      It is incongruent with the stated goals to attack civilian infrastructure. That smells more like total war than a “special military operation”.

      They’ve by now realized that the “nazis” were just ordinary Ukrainians. Hence in russian propaganda “it’s worse than we thought” and all Ukrainians are nazis and Ukraine is a fictional country that doesn’t deserve to exist no matter what the people who live there think about the matter. They’ve been bombing schools, hospitals and green corridors since the very beginning by the way; and it has only galvanized Ukranians against even negotiating with the Russians. Terror attacks don’t work. Ukranians are fighting an existential battle and Russians in Ukraine don’t know why they are fighting. Bombing power plants won’t work either; they already did this with Zaphorizia (sp?) nuclear power plant, where they cut power lines to non-occupied Ukraine and used the plant as a shield against incoming attacks.

    • Ukrainian numbers have proven to be reliable. Ukrainian propaganda is masterful-it never lies. It just presents things in a way that your emotions will process so that you will be cheering for Ukraine. That’s a radically different technique of conducting information are from Russians, who create chaos, lack of trust, and as a result dissent. They are good at destroying the cohesiveness of others, but not rallying them around something which is what Ukraine achieved. when you create chaos you can lie, you can manipulate and even make an obvious lie; but when you want to rally support this will not work in the medium and long run, and Ukraine does not have a centralized institution for propaganda-just a bunch of younger, well educated and skilled itnernet users that know how social media works.

  4. Russia needs more Chechens to force regular, rural Russians to move forward or get shot in the back. It’s ‘old school’ but it worked in the past.

      • Russia simply cannot commit more troops without risking a USSR-style collapse of the russian federation as Buryatia and other far flung places realizing that being sent to a meat grinder in Ukraine is a bigger threat than simply leaving and directly defending themselves from Moskovites, who aren’t the ones fighting in Ukraine to begin with. If they all leave at the same time, whose going to stop them? This is just a first mover problem, and when things get desperate enough, someone will move first and others will follow.

    • Forcing an undisciplined, untrained, and unexperienced mob to walk into machine guns stopped working sometime before the first world war.

      A big part of the reason for the high casualties during the American Civil War (and they didn’t even have guns held to their heads if they did not advance) was that they were trying to use Napoleonic tactics with modern weapons. In effect, they were marching meat into a grinder. This is the same situation Russian conscripts, paroled prisoners, and other floor scrapings of the Russian forces would be in.

      They surrender, die, flee, disintegrate, panic others, and abandon every resource they were issued in their haste to escape slaughter.

      Mobs don’t win against real armies on a set battlefield, not even at twenty-to-one odds.

    • That isn’t how wars are won nowadays. It is most certainly how wars are lost.

      A bunch of farmers with AK’s charging in to battle? Yeah not going to happen.

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