Russia's parade tanks become a mass grave for its own troops
Created: 01/14/2023, 08:15
By: Christian Stör
Once feared, Russian tanks have proven extremely vulnerable in the Ukraine war.
An improvement in the situation is not in sight.
Moscow - The images are the same.
Russian tanks destroyed in the Ukraine war can be seen again and again.
Some have burned out completely, the towers of others have been blown off, and some soldiers are seriously wounded or even dead.
According to experts, Russia's enormously high losses of tanks are one of the biggest problems that Russia has had to deal with since the beginning of the invasion.
The numbers, which the Netherlands-based research group Oryx cites, are devastating indeed.
According to this, as of January 9, a total of 944 Russian tanks were destroyed, 73 were damaged, 60 were abandoned by Russia and 533 were captured by the Ukrainians.
As a neutral observer, Oryx only includes cases in its statistics where there is solid evidence of damage or destruction.
Usually this is a credible photo of the tank in question.
The Ukrainian General Staff puts the number of destroyed Russian tanks at 3,080 (as of January 9).
Russia has to endure the loss of numerous tanks in the Ukraine war.
© SAMEER AL-DOUMY/AFP
To get an idea of the extent of the losses, just look at the number of tanks that the entire Russian army had at its disposal at the beginning of the Ukraine war.
According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS, German: Center for International and Strategic Studies), this was about 2800 tanks.
Russian tanks prove to be extremely vulnerable in the Ukraine war
In fact, Russian tanks are indeed very vulnerable to the high-tech missiles Ukraine uses for defense.
"The real problem for tanks is that they break," Vadym Yunik, developer of private combat drones, told Kyiv Post in an
interview
.
"In this war, anything that sits still is vulnerable," Yunik said.
"Tanks are easy to find with a drone, and one that's not moving is pretty easy to hit."
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James Lewis of the CSIS even said in an interview with the
Moscow Times
that Russia's inability to find an answer to modern anti-tank weapons is putting the future of tank operations in question.
"Tanks will still have a place, but their future will matter less because of their vulnerability," he said.
Can Russia rearm its tank fleet in time?
It is questionable whether Russia will be able to increase its tank fleet again in the Ukraine war.
So Russia's most important production site was Uralvagonzavod in
Nizhny Tagil, Ukrainian magazine
Defense Express
, even before the war was only able to produce or upgrade 20-30 modern tanks per month.
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Now Russia is struggling with Western sanctions because important components are not made in Russia.
This also applies to Russia's miracle weapon, the T-14 tank, which a British staff officer once described as the most revolutionary main battle tank in the world.
So far, the T-14 has driven through Red Square in several parades, but it has not yet been used in the Ukraine war.
Russian tank reserve: just a pipe dream of Moscow?
Even the tank reserve, said to have numbered 8,000 vehicles at the beginning of the war, seems to be more or less just a pipe dream.
According to Ukrainian intelligence reports, in late March 2022 the commander of the 13th Guards Tank Regiment committed suicide after learning that 90 percent of the tanks his unit was supposed to use to go to war were in fact completely rusted.
By June, Russia, which theoretically has the world's largest fleet of tanks, was forced to send allegedly 41 refurbished T-62 tanks, originally intended for export to Africa, to Kherson to shore up territory there.
By October 2022, Ukraine had taken Kherson and claimed to have captured or destroyed at least 38 of the mostly outdated T-62s.
(cs)
