As of: February 6, 2024, 4:36 a.m
By: Karsten Hinzmann
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It is now a common sight on the various sectors of the front: a destroyed Russian tank, around 30 kilometers west of Kiev.
(Archive photo) Russia is bleeding profusely.
© Michael Brochstein/dpa
Ukraine is destroying tank after tank - always setting new record numbers, but Russia is tough.
Experts believe the country will be able to rearm at a rapid pace.
Avdiivka – Andrew Perpetua is flabbergasted – on
X
(formerly
) he writes: “These are today’s losses: 100 pieces.
The largest amount I have ever counted in one day.” The analyst Perpetua adds up the vehicle losses of both parties in the Ukraine war and publishes daily lists of them on his channel.
The shockingly high number hit him on Saturday (February 3rd).
After that, Russia lost at least 54 vehicles that day.
Another 16 were damaged.
Ukrainian losses were apparently light: nine vehicles were destroyed, abandoned or captured and another 21 were damaged.
This leads Forbes
to say: “This Saturday was one of the worst days of the war for Moscow.”
Forbes
goes further: “The clock is ticking.
The Kremlin could run out of combat vehicles in six months.”
A few days earlier, Vladimir Putin's troops had lost an entire column in one fell swoop at midday.
Footage on social networks shows the attack by Ukrainian drones on an armored Russian convoy - all vehicles are said to have been destroyed;
including three main battle tanks, one armored personnel carrier and seven armored vehicles.
They march at midday without any cover or infantry support or without monitoring the airspace.
According to
Bild
, their goal was to flank the contested town of Novomichajlivka to the south and advance to the strategically important road to Wuhledar.
The target was apparently positions of the 72nd mechanized infantry brigade of Ukraine.
Russia is cavalier about losses - what is broken simply stays put
Russia can no longer make full use of everything - Ukraine is apparently destroying things faster than Putin is able to retrofit.
However, the losses are priced into Russia's military tactics: Russians always think of people and material as a group and pay little attention to the individual person or the individual vehicle;
However, some of the recorded vehicle losses are only temporary from the battle: “The Russians assume that sooner or later they will march further forward anyway;
In this respect, crews of hit tanks simply get out and get back into the next one.
They leave the wreckage knowing that someone will take care of it,” says Ralf Raths.
The historian is director of the German Tank Museum in Munster.
During the first two years of the war, the Russians lost around 80 infantry fighting vehicles per month,
according to
Oryx analysts.
If this loss rate were to continue into the current year and at the same time the production of new armored personnel carriers remained stable at 30 to 40 per month, the Kremlin would have run out of combat vehicles in about two years,
Forbes
predicts .
So probably 2026. The situation will become precarious if Russia loses more and more vehicles to Ukraine - and perhaps at a faster pace than before.
According to Perpetua's Sunday tally, they lost 13 tracked IFVs on another single day - plus additional wheeled IFVs.
Russia will probably reach the end of its technical strength sooner than expected
Journalist David Ax rubs his eyes: “That implies a monthly loss rate of almost 400 armored personnel carriers.
So five times the rate we observed in previous years.
Unless the situation changes in Putin’s favor, Russia will no longer be able to provide vehicles for another two years of war.”
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German sources divide the list of lost Russian military equipment into four categories: “destroyed,” “damaged,” “abandoned,” and “captured”;
There were 1,776 vehicles destroyed, 644 damaged, 723 abandoned and 2,933 units captured intact by the enemy;
a total loss of combat power of 14,265 units - Oryx's figures agree with this, other sources are actually only very rudimentary.
The numbers are determined on the basis of evaluated satellite images - and are apparently evidence of Ukraine's correct tactics, even if the hoped-for success of the counteroffensive has not yet materialized.
Using Avdiivka as an example, German political scientist Carlo Masala explains in the
Hamburger Abendblatt
that Ukraine decided to hold Avdiivka for as long as possible so that Putin's troops would be bled out as much as possible.
Masala expects a “tactical retreat,” as he puts it, from the city every hour.
However, the Russians continue to fight doggedly for the city, without giving it much tactical importance - it stands as a symbol of the mutual test of strength.
Silver lining for Ukraine: loss of land is limited
The even better news for friends of free Ukraine, according to media reports, is how much ground the Ukrainians will lose if they destroy Russian attack units: very little.
On one of their heaviest days of the war, the Russians advanced a hundred meters in the south and around 1,000 meters in the north in the most violent section of the front - around Avdiivka.
However, reports about a shrinking of Russian capabilities continue to emerge from time to time.
For example, the
Tagesspiegel
had already speculated in mid-August last year that Russia would soon be fighting with its last cartridge - but that wasn't true.
According to the images available at the time, Russia was supposed to have picked up hundreds of old Soviet tanks from a military depot in Siberia.
Five months before the start of the Russian war of aggression, around 3,840 tanks and vehicles from the Soviet Union were still stored at the depot near the city of Ulan-Ude - which probably covers more than ten square kilometers, as the
Moscow Times
claimed.
The site is expected to open in November 2022
There were only around 2,600 military vehicles left.
Satellite images used by the mapping platform
Google Maps
show larger gaps between the rest of the equipment.
It is unclear whether the vehicles were sent to the front or used as spare parts donors.
After the first year of the war, Vladimir Putin's troops were estimated to still have more than 12,000 battle tanks, a number that NATO clearly exceeds with modern vehicles.
Based on current developments, there may be slight doubts as to the extent to which Russia will be able to gain a military foothold again in the coming period;
completely independent of the outcome of the Ukraine war.
NATO Commander-in-Chief Christopher Cavoli, however, swears to himself that Russia will emerge stronger in Europe after the end of the war and a pause in re-equipment, as the
Hamburger Abendblatt
quotes him: Within five years of the end of the war, an aggressive Russia could not only focus its army on the not only bring it back to its old state, but even expand it into a larger and more efficient armed force.
This includes a modernization program with new technologies that the West has to worry about - “from the hypersonic glide weapon Avangard, which carries nuclear bombs to their target at several times the speed of sound and with an unpredictable course, to the nuclear-powered underwater drone Poseidon, which could trigger radioactive tsunamis.
However, Cavoli leaves out the topic of tanks.
The possible huge tank formations of the Cold War have probably been overtaken by the current war dynamics.
However, Forbes
only assesses the current combat situation and is encouraged to find a silver lining on the horizon, as David Ax writes: He assumes that there is still a spark of reason on the part of the Russian General Staff: “No rational and moral commander would command many armored vehicles and exchange hundreds of soldiers for a few hundred meters of terrain gain.”
However, blogger Peretua can hardly find any reason for this hope in his tables - apart from this particularly favorable day for Ukraine.
Russia can still improve.
The facts speak for themselves.
(Karsten Hinzmann)