Since Russia widened its war on Ukraine 37 months ago, Russian forces have lost no fewer than 3,200 tanks in combat, according to an unofficial tally by the open-source analysts with the Oryx collective.
Ukrainian forces have lost around 950 tanks. That translates into a 3.4-to-1 loss ratio favoring Ukraine.
But in the eight-month battle for Kursk in western Russia, the Russians wrote off 66 tanks, while the Ukrainians gave up 55. That’s a mere 1.2-to-1 ratio favoring Ukraine. In other words, nearly even.
That’s bad news for Ukraine, which according to one recent analysis needs to inflict three times as many losses on Russia as Russia inflicts on Ukraine in order to degrade the Russian military faster than Russia degrades the Ukrainian military.
The Ukrainians were hitting that critical benchmark prior to their August invasion of Kursk in western Russia. During the invasion, which ended in a Ukrainian retreat last week, the Russians gave as good as they got, knocking out or capturing more tanks than the Ukrainians could afford to lose.
The Ukrainian armed forces went to war in February 2022 with around 1,000 active tanks—mostly ex-Soviet T-64s and T-72s. After losing around 950 tanks to Russian action, receiving another 850 or so tanks as donations from their allies and fetching others from long-term storage in Ukraine, the Ukrainians still have … at least 1,000 tanks.
The Russian armed forces went to war three years ago with around 3,500 active tanks—T-72s, T-80s and T-90s—and have lost 3,200 to Ukrainian action. Russian industry builds 500 or 600 new tanks a year—too few to make good losses—but the Kremlin also has access to thousands of stored tanks, many of them T-62s and T-54s dating from the 1960s and ’50s, respectively.
Tank trends
The two armies’ respective main sources for replacement tanks mean the Ukrainian tank corps is gradually becoming more modern as it takes delivery of more Western-made tanks including German-made Leopard 1s and Leopard 2s and American-made M-1s.
By contrast, the Russian tank corps is getting less modern as it inducts hundreds of older tanks, some 60 or even 70 years old. At the time of the Ukrainian retreat from Kursk last week—a departure precipitated by an elite Russian drone group deploying to the oblast and bombarding Ukraine’s main supply line—Ukrainian tankers had already achieved local tank superiority in some areas.
But not in Kursk, a veritable graveyard for armored vehicles owing to the relatively small scale of the battlefield in the oblast, the high concentration of Russian and Ukrainian forces and, most critically, the sheer number of explosive drones patrolling overhead.
Destroying roughly as many tanks as they lost in the oblast, the Russians deprived Kyiv of a badly needed victory. According to Frontelligence Insight, a Ukrainian analysis group, a 1-to-1 loss ratio is “an unfavorable scenario for Ukraine in a war of attrition, given its smaller initial stockpile and limited ability to replace lost vehicles.”
Read the full article here