Russia lost at least 68 armored vehicles in Ukraine over the last four days, including eight tanks. Even by the apocalyptic standards of Russia’s 21-month wider war on Ukraine, it’s a staggering blow. Ukraine’s losses in the same period reportedly are a tenth of Russia’s.
And those 68 destroyed and abandoned Russian vehicles are just the ones that Andrew Perpetua, an open-source intelligence analyst, has verified in photos and videos on social media. Actual Russian losses almost certainly are much, much higher.
The Ukrainian general staff for its part claimed its forces destroyed a shocking 175 Russian armored vehicles just between Thursday and Friday, including 55 tanks. On average, the Russians have been losing just three tanks a day since February 2022; the recent loss rate is nearly 20 times higher. Moscow reportedly also has written off at least five warplanes over Avdiivka.
Manpower losses are commensurate with vehicle losses. The general staff in Kyiv claimed 1,380 Russians died in Ukraine in a 24-hour period ending Friday. That would be one of the greatest single-day losses on either side of the wider war.
It’s obvious what’s driving up Russia’s casualties. For a couple of weeks now, seven or eight Russian regiments and brigades—each with up to 2,000 troops—have been trying, and failing, to surround and cut off one of the best-defended cities in free Ukraine: Avdiivka, which lies just northwest of Russian-occupied Donetsk in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region.
Day after day, the Russians roll out in long columns of tanks and fighting vehicles. Day and day, they run over mines, wander into missile kill-zones, blunder into artillery barrages and fall prey to explosives-laden drones.
But they keep coming.
It’s unclear why the Russians are willing to expend so many troops and vehicles in a failing effort to flank, cut off and ultimately defeat the Avdiivka garrison, which includes at least two brigades and regiments as well as attached battalions.
It’s possible Russian commanders hope to draw Ukrainian brigades into a costly fight in order to prevent those brigades from reinforcing Ukraine’s southern counteroffensive, which kicked off in June and has seen Ukrainian troops advance at least 10 miles on each of two major axes: one north of Russian-occupied Melitopol, the other farther east along the Mokry Yaly River Valley.
The Ukrainians also are advancing on the left bank of the Dnipro River as well as south of Bakhmut in the east.
If the Avdiivka assault indeed is a fixing effort, it probably has failed. “Ukrainian officials have already identified the Avdiivka push as a Russian fixing operation, and they are unlikely to unduly commit Ukrainian manpower to this axis,” the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, D.C. noted.
Maybe the assault isn’t a fixing effort. Maybe, instead, the Kremlin simply is desperate for a late-season win as the weather grows colder and wetter and opportunities for major offensive action dwindle. Maybe the Avdiivka fight isn’t really about Avdiivka at all.
Which makes sense, in a nonsensical sort of way. After all, “the hypothetical capture of Avdiivka will not open new routes of advance to the rest of Donetsk Oblast,” ISW explained.
But if the Kremlin targeted Avdiivka for its symbolic value, it badly miscalculated. The only thing Avdiivka stands for, two weeks into the bloody campaign, is dead Russians and wrecked Russian tanks.
The Russians could have quit after the first day of attacks cost them, in ISW’s estimation, at least 45 tanks and other armored vehicles. But they have persisted, their commanders apparently unbothered by the wholesale loss of entire companies and battalions.
In that sense, the Russians’ Avdiivka campaign eerily echoes their campaign around Vuhledar at the beginning of 2023. For weeks on end, Russian marines stormed the Ukrainian garrison in the settlement, 25 miles southwest of Donetsk.
The Ukrainians bombarded the assault columns. One road intersection in particular testified to the Russians’ refusal, or inability, to adapt. After weeks of Ukrainian ambushes, the intersection was littered with the hulks of a dozen or more destroyed tanks and fighting vehicles.
Today, Vuhledar is free. And so is Avdiivka, despite the Russians’ best efforts to bring the city under occupation.
Where this ends is hard to say. The Russians wasted the better part of two marine brigades failing to capture Vuhledar last winter. But an even costlier campaign around Bakhmut ended in a pyrrhic Russian victory this spring as Ukrainian brigades, having traded space for time and Russian casualties, ultimately quit the city 30 miles north of Donetsk.
If the Russians keep shoving regiments into the Avdiivka meatgrinder, they might eventually capture the city. But the losses they’re suffering could impair Russian operations across the 600-mile front line in Ukraine.
“So long as this high casualty rate can be maintained,” the Royal United Services Insitute in London pointed out, “it becomes possible to suppress Russia’s ability to train sufficient new troops to the standard needed to effectively conduct offensive action.”
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