Russian Equipment Losses & Reserves (2024) – The Changing Russian Force in Ukraine

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Please note one audio correction in the pinned comment regarding BMP-3 losses.

The war in Ukraine has long become one of attrition and endurance, where the status of the competing forces is arguably more important than individual pieces of terrain changing hands.

In this piece, leveraging the work of various people and sources, we look at what we can determine about the status of Russian equipment stocks and active vehicle fleets in 2024, and try to project potential paths forward and establish a baseline for comparing against Ukrainian forces in a coming episode.

Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/PerunAU

Reading and Sourcing:

Given the topic, I think it only right to first acknowledge some of those whose data and work have been used in this work and in the work of others:

Covert Cabal (including his most recent feature on RU tank storage levels)

HighMarsed (@HighMarsed)
https://x.com/HighMarsed

Jompy (@Jonpy99)
https://x.com/Jonpy99

AS-22 (@AS22_im) for GBAD counts
https://x.com/AS_22im/status/1811989654746595437

As well as others that I have mentioned in the past or in this video

Plus, of course I need to flag the value of the work of the VC loss database teams behind Oryx, Warspotting and Lostarmor (which I have referenced in several videos as a check against other data sets

Other relevant sources:

Baseline pre-war equipment figures per Military balance for commonality with other episodes

IISS – Russian T-90m Production
https://www.iiss.org/en/online-analysis/military-balance/2024/06/russian-t-90m-production-less-than-meets-the-eye/#:~:text=These%20figures%20suggest%20an%20average,when%20it%20launched%20its%20assault.

Dr. Jack Watling and Gary Somerville – A Methodology for
Degrading the Arms of the Russian Federation
https://static.rusi.org/methodology-degrading-arms-russia-rusi-op-june-2024.pdf

Dr Jack Watling – In Ukraine, Russia is Beginning to Compound Advantages
https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/ukraine-russia-beginning-compound-advantages

Russian media on threat posed by Finland in NATO
https://tass.com/defense/1721741

https://tass.com/politics/1786405

Russian warning of ‘proportional response’ to NATO in Finland
https://tass.com/politics/1775459

Referenced imagery/reporting on Russian presence on Finnish border
https://kyivindependent.com/russia-has-moved-almost-all-forces-from-finlands-vicinity-to-ukraine-media-report/

https://mil.in.ua/en/news/80-of-the-russian-troops-from-the-border-with-finland-were-transferred-to-ukraine/#:~:text=by%3A%20Yle%20magazine-,80%25%20of%20the%20Russian%20troops%20from%20the%20border,Finland%20were%20transferred%20to%20Ukraine&text=Russia%20has%20deployed%20most%20of,with%20the%20Finnish%20newspaper%20Yle.

Featured PZH-2000 image and reporting on hedgehog armour
https://www.forbes.com/sites/sebastienroblin/2022/11/29/hedgehog-armor-saves-ukraines-german-built-super-howitzer-from-russian-kamikaze-drone/

T-80 Image compilation
https://en.defence-ua.com/industries/tanks_overgrown_with_weeds_being_taken_from_storage_in_russia_how_long_it_takes_to_restore_them-3173.html

Reporting on usage of BTR-50
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2024/05/20/when-a-70-year-old-russian-btr-50-attacks-ukrainian-troops-its-bad-news-for-the-whole-russian-war-effort/

M-46 image included
https://x.com/war_noir/status/1805597359067328659?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1805597359067328659%7Ctwgr%5E88434fae75d37e99046b8ec8ecb8e3fd4bf83d11%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.defence-ua.com%2Fanalysis%2Fthe_russian_military_use_rare_korean_130_mm_projectiles_for_the_stalin_era_m_46_gun-10999.html

Caveats & Comments:
All normal caveats and comments apply. In particular – I would like to note as always that this material has been created for entertainment purposes and is not intended to be a complete or comprehensive examination of the topic in question and should not be relied upon to inform financial or other similar decisions.

Timestamps:

00:00:00 — Opening Words
00:01:19 — What Am I Talking About?
00:03:35 — Losses
00:13:49 — Does Quality Matter?
00:17:59 — Storage
00:37:45 — Production
00:42:30 — Production & Reactivations
00:53:46 — Trend And The Evolving Force
00:57:30 — The Path Forward
01:03:07 — Channel Update

while the pace of Battlefield movement in Ukraine has often slowed to a point where taking a tree line or a neighborhood might now be described as a major breakthrough equipment losses and munition consumption have often continued at speedrun rates over the course of 2024 Russia has made incremental territorial gains at a number of points along the front but it’s done so at the cost of literally thousands of Tanks armored vehicles and other pieces of heavy equipment Ukrainian visually confirmed equipment losses by contrast have been significantly lower but would still by themselves completely exhaust the inventories of many Western militaries to help make up for this incredible expenditure of vehicles guns and Munitions the Russian military has overwhelmingly relied on reactivation pulling Soviet material out of Russia’s vast storage yards and either pushing into service or cannibalizing it to reactivate and maintain other systems and so one of the big questions in this conflict is to what extent Russia and Ukraine able to endure the sort of equipment losses they’ve suffered so far how have those losses changed their Force composition or forced them to adapt and how long potentially can they each expect to endure this sort of intensity and rate of attrition given we’re still getting a number of new NATO announcements I think addressing that question from the Ukrainian perspective can probably wait a few weeks but today using open source data I do want to look at how this war has affected Russia’s equipment picture and how much it might have left in the tank to do that I’m going to try and weave together three primary data sources I’ll look at visually confirm lost data and what it might tell us about what sort of equipment rusher is fielding and obviously potentially losing on the the field of battle and look at that alongside what we know about two primary sources of Russian replacement equipment what’s been withdrawn from and what Still Remains in Russian equipment storages and what sort of output levels are we seeing from Russian industry as we go we’ll make inferences where we can sense check against some Ukrainian data and try to build a picture of how the Russian equipment picture has changed and is likely to continue to change going forward I’m sure you’re ready for an exciting episode packed with Statistics and graphs but first I need to welcome back a long-term returning sponsor ground news events like the Ukraine Russia conflict tend to be all over the news with updates coming in from everywhere but with so much reporting coming out it might be useful to have access to a tool that helps give you a fuller picture and a more balanced perspective that’s why I’ve long appreciated ground news there are website and app that gathers related articles from more than 50,000 sources around the world into one place so you can compare how different Outlets cover the same story if you look at stories like this one regarding the US choosing to send a second Patriot missile battery to Ukraine for example like every story on ground news it’ll come with a clear assessment of the potential political lean ownership and headlines of the sources reporting all backed by ratings from three Independent News monitoring organizations it also lets you click through to see subtle differences in headlines and framing one of the most interesting features I think is the blind spot feed which highlights stories that have been disproportionately covered by one side or another of the political Spectrum depending what new sources you consume regular for example you might have been more likely to miss this story about Republican campaigns in Utah splitting over Ukraine Aid or this one about Saudi Arabia not renewing their so-called Petro dollar deal with the United States in the modern online environment it is incredibly difficult to avoid falling into an echo chamber there’s probably no single solution to that problem but a tool like ground news might help and there’s a reason they with this Channel’s first sponsor so if you’re interested go to ground. news/ Peron or use the link in the video description to subscribe today if you sign up through that link you’ll get 40% off the Vantage plan which is what I’m using and paid for I didn’t get it for free to get unlimited access to all of ground news’s features so with my great thanks to ground news as always let’s get back to it okay so let’s start with Russian forces and what we might be able to take from some of the visually confirmed lost data the goal here is to try and better understand what the Russian Force looks like from an equipment perspective in 2024 and how that’s changed over time visually confirmed lost data might be useful to help inform and answer that question because it provides us a large data set and also because all else being equal you’d expect there to be a correlation between the equipment being used and the equipment being lost very much a use it to lose it situation if for example over time we saw older and older Russian tanks making up a greater and greater proportion of Russian tank losses that might give us reason to suspect that older tanks are making up a larger proportion of the force over time Ukrainian longrange strike drones have gotten pretty good but I haven’t heard any stories of them hitting Russian tank museums yet and rather than always talking about individual models especially when we’re looking at things like Russian tanks and infantry fighting vehicles I think can be useful to divide them up into a couple of categories firstly the dividing line between Soviet and post Soviet systems the old and the new despite modernization efforts in February 2022 the Russian military was still operating a range of systems some had been designed during the Soviet years but primarily built after its fall or entirely designed and manufactured afterwards personally I usually put vehicles that Reed post Soviet upgrade packages in that category as well even if the underlying Hull had been manufactured many years before on the other hand there was still a lot of Legacy equipment in service including the most common form of Russian infantry Fighting Vehicle the bmp2 importantly for our purposes there was very little of this post Soviet material in Russian deep storage overwhelmingly it was made up of old Soviet kit and we’ll see the effect that’s had on the force composition over time in just a moment as the war’s gone on I’d argue we’ve also seen the emergence of two other distinct categories the first are what I want to call wartime models you’ll sometimes see this referred to them as the auzet 2022 versions of whatever tank or infantry Fighting Vehicle you’re discussing these vehicles present a weird sort of halfway point between old Soviet and new Russian Hardware they’re usually older vehicles that have received an upgrade package of some kind but the upgrade packaging question has usually been downgraded to account for things like sanctions and Equipment shortages seeing these tanks in the data is really useful because we can be relatively confident they don’t represent pre-war active Vehicles they are almost certainly going to be vehicles that have either been reactivated from storage or perhaps damaged vehicles that have been sent back for repairs and incidentally receive these packages the other category I’d break out are the very old and very ugly these are your Museum pieces your lashup designs your desperation Vehicles equipment that might remember the days of kushev or even Stalin the presence of which might suggest that maybe things aren’t all going according to plan because if your original plan did call for Rolling 50 60 or 70 year old systems out into active service more than 2 and 1/2 years into your Invasion then you could argue that maybe it was a bit of a plan so let’s start with tanks they tend to be useful to look at because they can be visually very distinctive and because the Russian military uses a lot of them which leads to usefully large sample sizes so what I’ve done for the next couple of slides is divide up Russian visually confirmed tank losses for three select periods into those categories we just talked about noting that when it came to classification I tried to give the Russians as much credit as possible all versions of the T90 for example have been classified as modern Russian designs even though the initial versions were developed and began production in the late days of the Soviet Union so far as sample periods go the three that I picked are early 2022 mid 2023 and mid 2024 you might recall that the prediction we made on this channel I think as far back as 2022 was that over time what we’d see was the Russian equipment stock polarizing with older and older equipment becoming more common over time as reactivation decisions became increasingly desperate while the very newest designs also stuck in there or even became more common because they were the runs rolling off the active assembly lines and if we look at the data so far it’s ugly but that’s more or less what’s happening in early 2022 nearly 70% of visually confirmed Russian tank losses were relatively modern Russian designs the remaining 30% were generally Soviet t64 t-72s and t8s by the May and June of 2023 the proportion of modern Russian designs in the tank force seemingly more than halfed at those Point those good tanks were only making up about 30% of the visually confirmed losses Soviet era 64s 72s and 80s about 60% with the remaining 10% being a mixture of those wartime models we discussed earlier and even older Soviet T 54s 55s and 62s 12 months on from that in May June 2024 the proportion made up by that blue bar is holding relatively steady still around 30% but the proportion of unmodified Soviet t64 72s and 80s in the force has significantly reduced and now more than a third of losses are accounted for by the combination of those orange and white bars that approximate third of Russian visually confirmed tank losses is roughly evenly divided between wartime models on one hand and even more t54 55 and 62s on the other and indeed we’re seemingly getting close to the point where that museum piece category of vehicles is making up almost a fifth of Russian tank losses but if you want to see that polarization phenomenon that we predicted a long time ago better you have to break out one additional category in early 2022 the t90m was around only in very small numbers but was in active production and so we can be pretty confident that most of them have been built or upgraded since the invasion began which I think makes them worth splitting out in early 2022 the t72 b3m was the king of that Russian category but as t90m production has continued over the course of the war it’s made up a larger and larger share so you do seemingly have a situation where both the most garbage of garbage models and the newest of newest models T14 excluded have been become proportionately more important to the fleet over time at the expense of the middle of the field I can only imagine that leads to pretty significant disparities and anxieties between Russian tankers and various units if you’re a tanker in the American Military you’ll be allocated an Abrams and Abrams or maybe an Abrams but if you’re in the Russian military you might have a 10% chance of being allocated a t90m pretty good compared to most of the other stuff out there on the battlefield or you roll in that bottom 20% bracket and get allocated that something that was manufactured at a time when the Beatles were the new kidss on the Block the situation with infantry fighting Vehicles which in some cases might be even more important in tanks is similar but with a recent twist the three most common forms of Russian track infantry fighting vehicles are the bmp1 BMP 2 and BMP 3 the BMP 1 made a heck of a splash when it was first introduced in the 1960s but in most parts of the world it’s now considered horrendously Obsolete and the mainline Russian if in early 22 was the bmp2 the bmp2 is still Soviet vehicle introduced in the 1980s that’s basically a much updated bmp1 but it did arguably fix one of the BMP 1’s greatest floors with a significant Armament upgrade despite being active in large numbers however the BMP 2 was not in active production in 20202 only the more modern post Soviet BMP 3 was and so we’ve seen those modern BMP 3s go from making up just over 20% of Russian visually confirmed BMP losses in early 2022 to just under 20% in mid2 3 to about 80% in mid 2024 once again it seems production drives stability what has changed massively over time is the share of the force made up of the older but useful bmp2 compared to the old and not so useful BMP 1 those very old BMP ones went from making just over 10% of BMP losses in early 22 to more than 40% in mid 2023 dropping back to around 30% in mid 2024 essentially what may have happened is the Russians went for anything they could reactivate quickly in mid 2023 and then seem to have found a way to generate or regenerate more BMP tws in mid 2024 the interesting twist here that we’ll come back to in a moment is that despite the BMP 2s becoming relatively more common again which we might not expect we’ve still seen BMP 1s pulled out of Russian storages in immense numbers there’s a lot that might be going on here of course it might simply be a time lag situation where BMP 2s were pulled out of storage but have taken some time to re activate and we’re only seeing them now but I’ve also spoken to a number of analysts who have put forward the theory that what might be happening is that BMP 1’s are instead being cannibalized to repair and reactivate BMP 2s as far as the war in Ukraine is concerned one of the most important differences between the two vehicles is the bmp1 mounts a relatively short-ranged inaccurate 73 mm gun while the BMP 2 has a 30 mm Auto cannon that’s generally assessed to be much more useful so not out of the question that you might cannibalize a bmp1 in order to repair an existing bmp2 or that you take a bmp1 and mount some sort of upgraded Armament on it as an anecdotal aside we recently saw some images and footage come out of Russians using this thing that’s the famously not very good Grom gun from a bmp1 which has apparently been mounted on a rough trailer chassis of some kind and is now being rolled around by Russian troops and used as a basic artillery piece suffice to say this does not look like a factory standard design and so you’re probably looking at a bmp1 gun that’s been scavenged from a vehicle somehow either one that’s been destroyed or damaged in combat or one that’s been left Surplus after a vehicle has been upgraded or cannibalized that said we haven’t seen any evidence of this happening at any sort of significant scale yet so while it’s interesting I wouldn’t jump the gun on its overall commonality or importance a final interesting phenomenon to pull out a Russian visually confirm loss data with all the usual asterisks of course is the increased frequency at which we’re seeing things like motorcycles ATVs and of course the desert cross 1000s the famous golf buggies seemingly suggesting that just like that Russian State media article we looked at last week indicated these speed-based semi madmax style assault tactics may have become considerably more common over time and with them the usage of this sort of lighter material now there’s a follow on here which is part caveat and part interesting question when we do analysis like this often we count things by categories tanks infantry fighting vehicles aircraft that kind of mushes things together to the point where you’re assuming that a tank is a tank whether it’s a leopard 2 or a t-55 and also assumes that if equipment is being used it’s going to show up proportionately in the lost data no matter whether it is a good system or a bad one the question to raise then is is that a safe assumption and in Ukraine does quality ever matter in terms of loss rates if we’re seeing a particular sort of tank less often in the visually confirmed loss data is that because fewer of them are being used or because they’re less likely to end up in situation where you end up posted to telegram I’d suggest a lot of the data available to us indicates that yes things like good tanks do tend to get lost at fairly High rates in the early stages for the war for example some of the best Russian armor things like the t72 b3m or t80 BVM were actually over represented in Russian losses compared to their share of the overall Russian tank fleets but I think we still need to be careful about assumptions because for every potentially useful general rule there are often a few annoying Theses destroying exception if you want an example of one of those kind of anomalies in the Ukrainian lost data let me quickly tell you A Tale of Three different artillery systems Ukraine’s received a wide array of NATO standard 155 mm self-propelled guns from various powers for this exercise I picked three at random from the fully enclosed category the German Panza bitand the crab from Poland and the as90 from the United Kingdom for each of these systems while we can’t be entirely sure we’ve got a fairly good understanding of how many of these systems Ukraine is is likely to have received so far we also have our usual pool of visually confirmed loss data often courtesy of Russian drone teams and despite these all being self-propelled 155 mm guns the loss pattern across these systems looks very different as you can see on screen there in proportional and absolute terms the crab losses have been by far the most severe the as9s from the United Kingdom which started to arri considerably later than the first crabs have fared considerably better but the first pz 2000 systems are arrived in 2022 and to date we only have visual confirmation of one system being damaged not destroyed by enemy action although it should be noted there are other images out there of P at h2000 systems that have been damaged but to an extent that can only be classified as cosmetic if we applied our usual assumptions about losses generally correlating with the number of systems that have been sent we might be left assuming that Ukraine had more crabs than they likely do and that the pz h2000 fleet could be comfortably counted using the fingers on one hand so what might be happening here as Ukraine secretly received hundreds of additional crabs or might there be a genuine difference in the loss rates here I think there are a lot of elements that might go into it although I don’t think we have enough data to balance between them for one the pz h2000 is going to have a range advantage over a lot of the other systems in Ukrainian service when it comes to artillery size can absolutely matter and compared to systems like as90 or the M109 the P h2000 has a bit of a length Advantage with the 52 caliber gun another significant technical advant manage might be added armor protection P at h2000 is a very chunky vehicle and anecdotally they’ve been pretty resistant to Russian counter battery fire a hit that might put a badana or Caesar self-propelled gun entirely out of action may just vaguely annoy the crew of a pz h2000 but there are other factors here beyond the raw technical that might explain these sort of discrepancies when they occur to take a hypothetical maybe a system isn’t being fielded as often because it happens to break down all the time or more relevantly potentially to the pz2 000 which units are allocated the system and how it’s used might also be different A system that is overwhelmingly allocated to specialized Heavy Artillery units for example might have different Battlefield tasks and face different threats than those that are allocated and used in different ways and at different ranges the underlying Point here is that what we might often have to make some pretty understandable assumptions when doing loss-based analysis I think it’s always important to occasionally dig a little bit deeper identify potential discrepancies and try to understand them with that caveat in place the next big piece of the picture is probably what the Russians have left in deep storage despite Russian efforts to scale up their defense industry since February 2022 as far as we can tell the overwhelming majority of heavy equipment sent to the front in Ukraine to replace losses or generate new units isn’t newly built modern equipment of the latest Russian types it’s overwhelmingly old Soviet material dragged out of storage for repair reactivation and maybe some upgrades Russia invaded Ukraine with a large army with with a lot of active equipment in a sense the Russian army that invaded was only Ukraine’s first problem the second third and ongoing problems have been the extra Soviet Army worth of heavy equipment that Russia had in storage but as the wars continued the wonder that is commercially available satellite footage has allowed us to watch those storages begin to shrink month after month there are a couple of key figures you’ll find on YouTube and Twitter who spend an anord amount of time and money sourcing this imagery and then painstakingly counting armored vehicles having done a fair amount of myself trust me it doesn’t make for the most engaging of afternoons but in the description you’ll find links and recommendations for the work of people like covert cabal jumpy and Hast and to a great extent I’m going to be relying on some of their most recent data and imagery for this section highas and covert cabal for example recently completed a count across Russia’s tank storages and to the greatest extent possible they divided the vehicles they could see into three categories those that appeared to be in decent condition meaning there was nothing obviously wrong with them those that were in visibly poor condition and those that were in the worst condition and trust me when you’re talking about Russian storage standards for equipment that might have been standing out in the open for decades at this point it takes an awful lot to find your way into that worst category your vehicle might be a significant percentage rust by that point and some counts won’t even include equipment that might fit in that category but given just about any hole might potentially be useful I’ve kept them in the count here with those caveats and comments in place here’s the picture here the most important parts of the bar are probably the red and the blue red is what appears to have been removed from Storage between 2021 and the latest available imagery presumably in most cases the vehicles that were removed were going to be those in the best condition the blue bar down the bottom then is what they assess to still be there that might be in reasonable condition now not every vehicle removed from Storage is going to have been sent to Ukraine or become a loss a lot of vehicles for example might still be at Russia’s various armor repair plants but the numbers you see there up pretty Stark the team couldn’t identify any remaining t9s the overwhelming majority of Russia’s t8s the most commonly reactivated tank and one of the most preferred for service in Ukraine at this point have been removed as well of the roughly 1,200 t80 BS and bvs that they counted in 2021 perhaps 200 in decent condition are still sitting in the storage yards increasingly a lot of what’s left looks less like the stuff you’d find on the dealership floor and more like the kind of beaters you might SE parked by the side of a road with a handwritten for sale sign it also seems to suggest that if things continue as they have been russer is increasing going have to be less picky when it comes to both the age and condition of vehicles that it’s pulling out to help bring the implications of this data home I think there’s two other useful ways to cut it the first is to look at it in percentage terms for each of the vehicles involved it shows even more clearly that Russia has been trying to get its hands on every t80 or T90 that it possibly can while some of the older t-72s that don’t appear to visually have anything wrong with them have so far survived even more Stark is what happens if we assume that the vehicles that Russia has pulled out of storage were those in decent condition I don’t think that’s necessarily always a safe assumption they may have pulled some older more wrecked Vehicles out of storage for canalization for example but if you assume the total inventory of tanks in decent condition equal those that are still there plus those that have been removed here’s what things look like in percentage terms of the tanks in decent condition that have been removed so far as you can see for no tank class is that number less than 50% and for some it’s racing towards being an overwhelming majority Russia hasn’t run out of tanks and would it even be Russia anymore if it ever did but this data does suggest that a majority of what might have been in reasonable condition is it now at least in the pipeline a lot of those Vehicles will already have found their way to Ukraine While others might still be at factories or repair bases but either way while this deep well of replacement Vehicles may not be empty yet it is looking much much shallower than it was 2 and 1/2 years ago now while tanks get a lot of attention there are a range of other systems that might arguably be even more significant for Russia’s long-term combat power artillery is obviously a big one and I’ll have a more detailed look at those systems in the future but this is also a war that consumes infantry fighting vehicles and arm anded personnel carriers at prodigious rates Vehicles like bmps btrs and mtbs are even more numerous in Russian service than main battle tanks and golf cart and motorcycle enabled assaults aside these are still the vehicles that carry the overwhelming majority of the burden of providing armored mobility and fire support to Russian infantry and here in large parts thanks to jumpy over on Twitter we have some estimates about what was and remains in Russian if and APC storage at first glance those numbers might appear fairly Stark with a majority of all mtbs and bmds having come out of storage there being more bmps removed than those believed to remain in decent condition and then it gets even more jarring when you remember that BMP category includes three distinct Vehicles the modern BMP 3 the older but still useful bmp2 and the original bmp1 and I won’t award the audience any points for guessing which of those systems were removed from Storage first Russia still obviously has a lot of remaining bmps in storage especially if they’re able to reactivate some of those in worse condition but that data does suggest that in terms of vehicles that are in decent condition the most common remaining APC or infantry fighting vehicle looked at is the btr60 and if you want an idea of what we’re talking about when we say btr60 uh here’s a black and white photo of one in Czechoslovakia and most versions of this vehicle are likely to lack certain Modern Luxury features like you know a hatch to allow the troops to disembark safely from the rear of the vehicle rather than clambering out the top or sides or a mounted Armament heavy enough to outgun your average Texan civilian in part because of the immense time lag involved in all of this the delay between a vehicle being pulled out from Storage eventually restored sent to the front and eventually potentially becoming a loss that needs replacement in turn I really don’t think we’re going to see a surge in Russia using junk like this starting tomorrow on current trends you may only see serious equipment degradation play out in 2025 or 2026 but I’d argue some storage levels are far more strategically significant than others and they’re not all depleting at equal rates likely near the top of the list in terms of importance of Russia’s artillery storages it’s generally accepted I think that Russ’s Superior ability to dump volumes of artillery shells or rockets on obstacles until those obstacles go away has been a key element of many of Russia’s offensive and defensive successes in this war to date the challenge for us as observers however is that determining how rapidly Russia is consuming artillery in order to achieve those effects is a little bit more difficult than with things like tanks and ifes as a general rule artillery losses tend to happen further behind the front line which makes it less likely that evidence of their destruction is recorded and helpfully uploaded to the internet and also one of the main drivers of artillery systems being consumed may not necessarily be enemy action but things like Barrel Weare the more you shoot essentially whether you hit anything or not the more you lose that makes it perhaps even more interesting to observe Russian Artillery storages to see what’s being withdrawn and at what kind of rate the patterns we’ve seen so far have been fairly dramatic and to illustrate let’s start by talking about just one Soviet system the D30 is a 122 mm system originally designed in the 1950s it was widely used around the world but a bit of a footnote in the Russian Artillery force of 2022 that combination of features again makes it pretty useful for analysts because if we see Russia using or losing d30s we can be fairly confident that they were not pre-war active pieces but rather ones that have been reactivated since there are certain elements about the D30 design which might make it fairly attractive to reactivate in an emergency but generally those have nothing to do with it being a particularly good artillery piece it is comparatively simple available in large numbers and because of that relative Simplicity you might have an easier time reactivating this piece and training private conscript of it on it than you would if you were dealing with a top tier modern self-propelled gun plus you can’t have a situation where someone stole the wiring while it was in deep storage if the system in question doesn’t include any wiring whatever the motivation we’ve seen the D30 used both by the ukrainians who have also received some of these systems from allies and the Russian military itself with Russian State media having published a reasonable amount of material showing d30s in use and that apparent use corresponds with a massive draw down in the number of d30s we can see in storage the numbers you’re seeing on screen there are again courtesy of highas two counts things in Russian storage bases so you don’t have to images taken before Russia’s fullscale Invasion Ukraine show about 3,200 d3s at the examined Russian storage bases in his most recent update by contrast he could identify 937 the situation may actually be significantly worse than that because in many ways the numbers you’re seeing here are a lagging indicator a lot of what you’re seeing here is based on images from 2023 and so I’m sorely tempted to order some custom 2024 footage to see what might have changed in the 6 to 12 months since the other question of course is as the number of remaining systems in storage becomes smaller and smaller whether or not any of what’s remaining has been left there for a reason maybe because of damage or wear for example that isn’t exactly visible in a satellite image an even older system we’ve seen reappear in both Russian Ukrainian service is the Soviet m46 this is a heavier piece originally designed in the 1940s which first entered production in 1951 based on when production is believed to have ended the absolute newest guns out there are still going to be more than half a century old at this point but age wasn’t the only reason we might not have expected the Russians to race to reactivate the 600 or so guns they believed to have started with in storage on paper the m46 in fact has a relatively reasonable range compared to things like the d30s we just looked at but in terms of logistics and Supply it might have been a bit of a headache using the relatively archaic 130 mm Ukraine desperate for just about anything that will go bang and inflict a greater effect on target than a party popper did receive some of these systems from countries like Croatia and just because of the way politics and ammo supply happened to align was able to obtain shells as well but given Russia was already operating pieces in 100 mm5 122 125 152 and 203 and presumably had thousand and thousands of guns in those calibers still available in storage it probably didn’t make that much sense in 2022 or 2023 to rush to introduce a new gun and yet another caliber unless the goal was to motivate more Logistics officers to request transfers to other less stressful roles like Frontline assault infantry even if the guns were reactivated at scale it wasn’t initially apparent where the ammunition for them might come from but in June 2024 here apparently we are we have footage reportedly m46 guns on trains within Russia videos reportedly of guns being towed by trucks within Russia and regarding this footage I’ll make two quick notes firstly the caption calling it a World War II field gun isn’t accurate and secondly that the unit in question appears to have already destroyed its first Target without getting anywhere near the front and finally we have imagery and video of these pieces apparently in active use and importantly here we get a clue as to why reactivations like this might be happening I said before that one of the challenges with reactivating and using m46 is the availability of that 130 mm ammo but it turns out one of the countries out there that still believed to have significant stocks of the stuff is the dprk North Korea another is the Islamic Republic of Iran as we’ve discussed before both Nations obviously deny supplying arms to the Russian Federation and so I’m sure they’re thrilled when Russian sources continue to provide the internet with images and video apparently showing ammo from those countries as a result I’d be cautious suggesting whether or not the use of m46 by Russia indicates a shortage of guns a short of ammunition or some combination of the two whatever the case I think it illustrates the ongoing evolution of the Russian Army’s artillery from a force that was moving towards more and more Reliance on modernized self-propelled guns firing preferred calibers to one relying more and more on older toad pieces that will successfully yeat anything that happens to be available to seat to give a sort of bigger picture read to close out the artillery section here are the estimates for one of Russia’s larger toad artillery storage bases that shows a decline from around 1,870 pieces well before the Ukraine Invasion down to around 755 this March that’s a roughly 60% reduction but it doesn’t tell the entire story by itself what I’ve done here is take those before and after figures and split them out into World War II pieces and postwar 100 122 and 155 mm systems and what that seems to show as you might expect is that the withdrawal rates haven’t been even across systems at all the over overwhelming majority of the 152 and 122 mm systems are gone along with about half of the 100 mm guns and so a disproportionate share of what’s remaining are believed to be m30 guns a design that first entered service in 1939 in the future we might look at other bases and aggregate the whole picture together but for now the general take seems to be this Russia is not out of stored artillery pieces we can still see literally thousands of them but the apparent burn rate has been astonishing with more than a thousand guns to appearing from this base alone and as time goes on we can probably expect the average quality of what’s left to go down while the average age increases now obviously storage bases aren’t the only place that Russia could potentially pull replacement equipment from they could also pull it from their active duty stocks in various bases spread across Russia so where possible from open source it can be worth monitoring these installations to see how much equipment there might still be there which might suddenly find itself on a train West to replace losses or meet requirements that totally don’t exist as an example here credit to Twitter user as22 who looked at satellite imagery of 17 Russian air defense bases in the east of the country AKA a long way from Ukraine I highlight that thread both because it’s interesting and also cuz it ticked a lot of the boxes for this sort of analysis the thread included the images that were being compared the dates of those images and the coordinates of the base those three things make it much much easier for other users to check the findings and verify the results what he found was that launches for the s300 or S400 air defense system had been removed at 11 of those 17 locations in total 105 units by itself that sounds like a lot of launches and it very much is if Ukraine got all seven Patriot batteries it was asking for it still wouldn’t total just to the number of Ts that have been removed from these specific Russian bases what those numbers alone don’t tell you is that a lot of these bases weren’t just having a little bit of their equipment drawn down to the point where they could still conceivably function some of these installations were stripped bloody bare and for all tend and purposes probably shouldn’t be regarded as having an active air defense battery present at all whether these launchers have been dispersed away from their bases sent to replace losses in Ukraine or disperse to parts of Western Russia to provide increased defense against Ukrainian drone attack we can’t be sure all we know is that the Russian Federation began its fullscale invasion of Ukraine with a massive air defense system spanning territories like kaliningrad in the west all the way to Bases facing towards Japan in the East a wide ranging air defense blanket covering a lot of the Federation now in 2024 the blanket may have become just a bit too small and is now being pulled to cover areas with the most desperate requirements but even then you might be thinking sure Russia is sending a lot of equipment from Eastern Russia to Western Russia but that might not be for Ukraine instead it might be about conventional deterrence against NATO after all Russia talks all the time about how threatened It Is by NATO expansion about how it will respond to things like Finland joining NATO or allowing US troops into the country and it partly helps justify things like its invasion of Ukraine on the grounds that it is under genuine risk of attack by NATO and so in order to avert a hypothetical invasion of Russia they claim to be justified launching an actual invasion of neighboring Ukraine the problem with this is that while Russia often rattles the saber and talks about how threatened It Is by NATO when it actually comes to troop and Equipment allocations often it doesn’t act like it when it became clear that Finland was going to attempt to join NATO we saw some voices in Russia talking about undetermined military technical countermeasures then in December last year everyone’s favorite Gremlin spokesman Demitri pesov said to quote from Russian State media quote Finland has become a NATO member and NATO’s military infrastructure is going to enter Finland it will definitely pose a threat to Russia yet Finnish sources are saying that compared to pre-invasion levels some 80% of Russian troops have been transferred away from The Finnish border and a lot of the satellite images we’ve seen released Russian bases approximate to Finland show similar patterns in 2021 where by the Russian narrative Finland didn’t pose a threat to Russia nor should have it felt threatened in turn some of these bases had entire Parks full of military equipment for the troops stationed or supported from there cut to Mid 2024 and Russia has clearly responded to the rising Threat Level from NATO by stripping these bases clean even in situations where frankly the image resolution leaves a bit to be desired you don’t always need spy satellite tier resolution solution to be able to tell an empty lot from a full one basically what I’m saying is that even though there is a chance we’re wrong the evidence in front of us suggests the following most likely because of the war in Ukraine Russia isn’t just stripping its storage bases it isn’t just stripping equipment out of bases in the Far East it’s pulling from units and stockpiles that were facing NATO itself which might give us a bit of a clue both in terms of How likely Russia actually thinks a NATO attack is and also just how much competing demand the war in Ukraine is generating at a big picture level the basic observation is probably that Russia began this war with a very deep closet by global standards the Soviet inheritance must have seemed endless field after field after field of artillery tanks and infantry fighting Vehicles spread across Russia a b after 30 years of Nursing and conserving that Legacy Russia appears to have blown through most of it in just over two Russia is very much not out of Tanks or infantry fighting vehicles and as we can see there are still a bunch of guns and holes out there but depending on the system you’re talking about we may be at or getting to the point where most of the good stuff at this point is gone the restoration of the average vehicle being pulled out of storage is likely to become more expensive and more demanding over time and especially when you’re talking about toad artillery more and more of what we can see remaining is the truly ancient the stuff which might work might have some value might certainly be dangerous but which might also put Gunners at a significant disadvantage AG in terms of things like range and accuracy compared to their opponents and generally offer all those top tier performance characteristics that only the best equipment of the 1950s and 60s can offer these stockpiles have given the Russian military incredible staying power but not infinite staying power the final input of note here that I want to look at and also the hardest one to assess at least until we get better Russian data is the question of what sort of material Russia’s defense industry is now managing to produce and is likely to produce in the future here we have number of different estimates for different systems or types of material that in some cases might give us varying clues about the overall picture estimates for Russia’s production of its t90m tanks for example have a fairly wide variance the I for example identified 13 batches of t90m delivered since May 2022 and use that to generate an estimate of somewhere between 231 and 267 tanks over the course of a little over 2 years other sources often more PR Russian will give us estimates as high as 200 perom neither of those would be completely out of step with the lost data we looked at earlier so far as Russian ammunition production goes rousi recently released new estimates which they indicated were based on internal Russian mod documents they estimated Russian production in 2024 of 1325 m152 mm shells 8,122 mm shells and a significantly increased production of artillery Rockets from a pre-war rate of 33,100 22 mm Rockets to 500,000 in 2024 and a jump in 220 mm mrl rocket production from 2800 in 2023 to 177,000 in 2024 the theory here is that Russia has focused on scaling up production of ammunition for its rocket artillery systems because unlike Cannon artillery Barrel availability isn’t expected to be as much of a problem for the most part A Rocket artillery tube is pretty much just a tube and so ammunition availability is often going to be the defining Factor whereas for Cannon artillery barrels are very much a bottleneck especially if you insist on feeding them North Korean ammunition with dodgy equality control standards which is probably going to be about as healthy for a barrel long term as a diet consisting of nothing but deep fried marsbars would be for human arteries rousi does however assess that overall Russia’s availability of these main caliber artillery Munitions is likely to remain stable at about 4 million Munitions for both 2024 and 2025 in significant part because of deliveries of Munitions from places like North Korea Syria and Iran are making up the difference in terms of armored vehicles Rousy gives an estimate for produced bmps over the course of 2023 a total of 463 for the year as a whole that figures an interesting one to check against what we saw in the visually confirmed loss data when Russia invaded in 2022 the roughly 600 BMP 3s the Russian Ground Forces made up just over 20% of the estimated active BMP Fleet like a lot of relatively highquality Russian armed Vehicles they were then overrepresented ented in the early 2022 loss data presumably cuz a lot of the better stuff and better units got sent in first since then approximately 500 BMP 3s have made it onto the visually confirmed loss chart not all of them catastrophic losses but also you don’t expect all losses to be visually documented if you make some very quick back of the envelope assumptions like q1 and Q2 2024 production being roughly equal to average overall 2023 production and then increase the visually confirmed loss count by about 25% to account for things that might not be documented things that just wear out non-combat losses Etc which are just illustrative figures I’m not making any claims about accuracy here you’d end up with about 700 BMP 3s produced in 2023 and 2024 to date up against about 750 losses there’s a lot of factors we’re not integrating here like the change in what the total size of the overall BMP Fleet active over time might have been but it is interesting to see those sort of figures come out when overall bmp3 share of the visually confirmed losses has remained relatively constant over time almost as if the rates of production or repair have generally been enough to keep up with the overall rate of losses but not enough to start seriously compensating for losses in other systems like BMP 1 and 2 I’ll come back to this overall production question more in the future but for the moment the big picture assessment which is in some ways easier than the more detailed one is probably this Russia has significantly scaled up production of various War materials since the invasion in 2022 that’s true of of long-range missiles of artillery Munitions and of armored vehicles but even those scaled outputs of things like infantry fighting vehicles and artillery Munitions are nowhere near enough to keep up with the apparent rate of loss that theory generally matches I’d suggest our observation that Russian storages continue to be drawn down and the composition of Russian equipment at the front continues to change Russia’s defense industry has been able to take the edge off the rate of equipment consumption in Ukraine but the Russian military has still been heavily reliant on stockpiled material and foreign sources in order to actually keep up with it even though this is the video on Russia not Ukraine given the sheer number of unknowns involved I thought it might be useful to sense check some of the approach we’ve been using so far against some Ukrainian data basically looking at what similar sorts of data visually confirmed losses and known pre-invasion inventories might suggest to us about the number of main battle tanks that Ukraine is repairing or reactivating during the Soviet era Ukraine was a major center of the Soviet military industrial complex and when the union disintegrated Ukraine inherited not just a bunch of Defense equipment but also defense industrial infrastructure and to an extent a Workforce and knowhow and in the ’90s and early 2000s the Russian Federation continued to import a range of Defense material from Ukraine however just like the Russian defense industrial base the Ukrainian one would atrophy considerably when it was no longer sustained by the Soviet government coming along every couple of years and signing a blank check for enough tanks and armored vehicles to drive through the nuclear fallouts all the way to the Rind and unlike the Russian defense base there wouldn’t be a massive infusion of money and orders in the 2000s in order to slowly build things back up so the big question from our perspective is probably just what sort of contribution can what’s left of Ukraine’s defense industrial base make to the country’s endurance in this current War here we do have some vague official figures that we might be able to make some use of the Ukrainian mod for example has reported that approximately 1500 pieces of heavy military equipment or vehicles have been repaired or reactivated and handed back over to the military since 2022 but while those official figures might be giving us something to work with I think we should be looking at the battlefield for some further Clues as well because anyone can say they’re developing or producing military equipment but actually getting it to the battlefield requires just that little bit extra commitment just asked the T14 a vehicle which has been arriving any day now to crush the Ukrainian military since 2022 to get an illustration of what Ukraine might be achieving in terms of the reactivation or repair of older equipment we need an indicator and here I’m going to nominate the T 64 tank throughout its history the Soviet Union operated a wide array of different tank designs and models and within the family of Soviet tanks you’ll often see a divide between sort of more upper shelf more advanced models intended primary for Soviet use and cheaper simpler designs or versions that would often find their way overseas when it came to 1960s Soviet tank designs the t62 was the basic model and the t64 had a bit more bling the Soviet Union was willing to send the t62 just about anywhere in the World there was a leader willing to put their hands up and say mildly positive things about Soviet communism in order to get access to their free down with capitalism starter pack consisting of Soviet economic aid AKs and of course main battle tanks while the t-64’s produced in hariv were hoarded within the Soviet Union itself that little bit of History shapes the sort of assumptions that we can make as analysts today we know there are very few countries around the world except for Russia and Ukraine that have significant stocks of t64 in inventory where we also know that while Russia has a significant number of t64 stored from the visually confirmed loss data they don’t appear to have used them in serious numbers yet compared to other types by contrast Ukraine started the war with more than a few of these things more than 80% of the active Ukrainian tank fleet was made up of t64 models plus they were the ones with the facilities and Workforce in hariv that specialized in maintaining and modernizing them so long story short if Ukraine has been able to get access to additional t64 unless someone in charge of Russian tank storages has taken corruption to a whole new level it’s very unlikely they came from some sort of undisclosed foreign aid it’s also comparatively much less likely than when you’re talking about Vehicles like t72 t80 bmp1 or 2 Etc that they are captured from the Russians instead I think we can be pretty confident that if the Ukrainian t64 Fleet is being maintained or expanded it’s using domestic sources not foreign assistance voluntary or otherwise so what we need to do next then is trying and work out how many t-64’s we expect to be seeing how many we’re actually seeing and as a result what the difference in terms of production and reactivation might be to make that calculation though you need at least three data points the composition and size of the Ukrainian tank Fleet When The War Began which we have some pretty good estimates of how many tanks Ukraine might have gained from various foreign sources which again we have some estimates for and then finally how losses may have shaped the Fleek composition for that we have two potential alternative sources available to us the visually confirm lost databases and the Russian Ministry of Defense Moscow would obviously never lie so we’ll start with the Russian figures on screen there you have the official Russian Ministry of Defense claims for destroyed Ukrainian military equipment as of July 2024 these include 626 fixed wi aircraft 277 helicopters 540 air defense systems 16,5 128 tanks and other armored fighting vehicles 1,369 mrls 11,556 field artillery guns and mortar and 23,453 units of socalled special military equipment which have quote been destroyed during the special military operation end quote so I guess we’re not counting damaged in these figures either there are a couple of problems with some of these figures but the biggest one is what happens when you start comparing them to the amount of equipment that Ukraine actually started with or has received from various sources for example Ukraine’s believed to have begun the war with just over 350 mrls received maybe 113 from various sources plus of course those ad hoc vehicles that might have been cobbled together on occasion those Vehicles like Humvees or pickup trucks with a couple of Rocket tubes strapped on the back do exist but they’re a fairly small minority in the existing visually confirmed loss data so leaving them aside for a moment we get a situation where Ukraine started with 354 systems gained 113 and then lost 1,370 to enemy action to say nothing of things like equipment wearing out or breaking down which means the Ukrainian military is currently doing a fantastic job apparently holding the Russian military back with its negative 900 mrls the situation with fix-wing military aircraft is arguably even more illustrative because you can’t exactly bash them together in your backyard you start with them restore them or receive them from foreign sources or you don’t have them here if you start with Ukraine’s relatively meager pre-invasion inventory and then add not just the aircraft you Ukraine is thought to have received but all the aircraft that have been pledged as well but not yet delivered and here you’ll find the Russian military has again massively overperformed by somehow managing to destroy all of those aircraft including the ones that haven’t been delivered yet at least twice at this point I’ll stop throwing the boot in because I think you probably get the point I don’t dismiss official Russian claims because they’re biased or unreliable I dismiss them because they’re impossible if we switch over to using visually confirmed lost data we get the following for Ukraine’s tank Fleet the chart in front of you shows three main tank categories with four columns for each the t64 the t72 and everything else for each of those families the First Column shows how many active systems Ukraine had in 2021 according to military balance column two is how many systems in that category Ukraine is believed to have received since the fullscale invasion began that’s a composite of both donated vehicles and 1/3 of the number of vehicles visually confirmed captured assuming that it takes three captured vehicles on average to produce one operational tank column three is visually confirmed losses which leads to the result column four the implied remaining total obviously this exercise is very very messy and suffers from all the constraints that visually confirmed loss data involves if you ask how wide the error bars need to be on that one the answer is going to be yes but at this zoomed out aggregate level this exercise does seem to suggest something interesting at the very start of the invasion more than 80% of the Ukrainian active tank Fleet were T 64s if you use the figures we just Lo at the numbers now should be closer to 25% and if you assume tanks in general are lost in rough proportion with the numbers in which they’re employed you’d expect to see loss data reflect that instead while we’ve seen t64 losses go down as a share of overall Ukrainian tank losses over time the cut is nowhere near as deep as our previous numbers might suggest in 2022 noting that Russian tanks began to be captured and the first foreign aid was arriving the number was about 70% in 2023 about 50% and through the May and June of 2024 the most recent data available the number was still north of 40% now there are a wide array of things that could potentially be going on here T 64s for some reason may have gone from being lost at a disproportionately low rate in 2022 to a disproportionately high one in 2024 alternatively maybe the lost data is flawed or Ukrainian t64 tanks have the unique ability to reassemble themselves after they’re destroyed so they can be destroyed again spontaneously reassembling tanks and zombie crews are perhaps the only explanation I can think of that would make any sense of the Russian claim data but a much less interesting and much more plausible explanation is the one we explored with our Russian data earlier that there are just more Ukrainian t-64’s in service right now than the lost data alone might suggest and that one of the key drivers there might be Ukrainian repair and reactivation efforts that significant extra chunk of t-64’s may include Vehicles repaired or reactivated in the Czech Republic from Ukrainian stocks and ones repaired or react activated in Ukraine itself that in turn highlights a potential opportunity cost with the way Russia has so far carried on its strategic bombing campaign Russia has so far expended an enormous number of cruise missiles and longrange one-way attack drones those appear to have hit a wide array of facilities from power generation and transmission infrastructure to malls apartment buildings and hospitals a lot of those strikes have admittedly done significant damage but while those strikes have progressed the data we’ve looked at over multiple episodes or seems to suggest that during that time Ukraine’s defense industry has been able to reestablish and ramp up ammunition production scale the production of self-propelled guns and other artillery systems fielded an array of new or reactivated drones missiles and longrange systems of various types as well as sustain and even partially regenerate Ukraine’s Fleet of its Workhorse main battle tank the t64 now our assessments could be wrong and only Moscow knows why it makes the targeting decisions it does but overall if I had to take guess based on what we have in front of us it seems likely that Ukraine has been able to repair or reactivate hundreds of t-64’s since February 2022 some of that was likely taking damaged active vehicles and sending them back into service While others may have been pulled from Deep storage Russian style refurbished potentially upgraded and then added to the active Fleet that alone is obviously highly unlikely to meet Ukraine’s significant requirements but when it comes to estimating the endurance of Ukraine’s supply of heavy equipment going forward it is worth remembering that not all Ukrainian resupply has to come from another country and all this represents a relatively similar family of data sources to those we talked about earlier giving the hopefully relatively intuitive indication that Ukraine like Russia is reactivating and repairing old demain battle tanks orbe it at likely a significantly slower rate but with that sense check and comparison done let’s jump back to Russia to look at some of the big picture zoomed out observations about Russian equipment losses and the changing composition of the force over time observation one is that while the exact results do vary by system that polarization phenomenon we were predicting in 2022 and 2023 continues to play out albeit slowly the Russian military so far has been able to continuously regenerate new tanks new infantry fighting Vehicles New artillery systems but compared to 2022 the Russian army in 2024 is Fielding a lot more Museum pieces and wartime modifications as well it must be said as a continuous infusion of new build systems like 1990 M bmp3 and BTR 82 while some of the other middling elements of the force have been under continuous pressure it’s worth noting that while we have seen wartime versions of things like main battle tanks become more common over time a lot of the tanks being reactivated still seem to be skipping this process we have seen upgrad and modification packages for some older versions of the t80 for example but only a small minority of those pulled out of storage appear to have gotten those upgrades before being supplied to the Troops and used at the front at time of Rec reporting there are more than 570 t80 bvs on the visually confirmed loss list destroyed damaged abandoned or captured there are only 36 t80 bvs on that list with the wartime upgrade package that suggests to me that while Russia has continuously been able to generate equipment replacements for its armored units some combination of bottlenecks and urgency appear to have encourag them to cut corners and given these upgrade packages are often focused on fitting things like improved protection and thermal sights I’d argue this is a little less like speeding up deliveries at a car factory by skipping the fully sick rims and metallic paint job and more saving man hours on Superfluous extras like seat belts and airbags the basic observation then is that while the Russians have managed to generally hold things together from an equipment availability perspective they’ve been under immense pressure presumably both from very high equipment losses on one hand and also the pressure to expand the size of the Russian military on the other units that get wrecked often presumably need new equipment but so too do the entirely new ones and what that means is even in situations where hypothetically the Russian military was able to keep up with losses on at least a one for one basis on average the overall density of equipment levels would still be expected to drop over time because the force was trying to expand and we can observe that those pressures in terms of keeping units equipped may also be driving all sorts of improvisation and adaptation ad hoc protection upgrades or the use of very light vehicles and assault operations are all things that can make sense given local conditions but those local conditions might also include equipment availability issues yes the bloke strapping the BMP one gun to a cart have technically created themselves an artillery piece but I somehow doubt they’d be dedicating the personnel and effort to using that thing if they had more actual purpose-built artillery systems available Instead The key thing here I think is not to over underestimate what Russia has been able to achieve so far in terms of keeping up with equipment attrition they’ve already arguably pulled off a feat that very few if any other militaries in the world would be able to replicate by leveraging the heck out of their Soviet inheritance they’ve been able to generate and regenerate their way through truly incredible equipment losses there are very few other forces out there that might be able to endure the loss of something like 3,000 main battle tanks and still come out the other side with a significant MPT Fleet but at the same time there are two important caveats The Replacements have not been one to one in terms of quality terms and secondly they often continue to rely on a rapidly depleting finite Resource as a lot of those Soviet storage bases look emptier and emptier with every month that passes the final question then is probably what is the most likely path forward and what is the Russian military likely to look like over the medium and long term if this conflict continues the first thing to say is it seems very clear that one of Russia’s greatest assets the things that have arguably helped it endure the rate of losses it’s seen so far namely its vast storage yards full of old Soviet equipment are not yet fully depleted but certainly starting to show signs of strain different systems have obviously been accessed and removed at different rates so while some systems may be fully depleted at this point others might still have several years of inventory hypothetically remaining but honestly I think determining how long what’s left is enough to sustain the Russian war effort requires us to make a couple of assumptions for example you probably have to make assumptions about quality and how much more expensive slower and more difficult it is to restore a vehicle in relatively poor quality as opposed to one that is visually at least from a satellite view in relatively good condition but even more critically it rests on what sort of assumptions you want to make about Russia’s equipment burn rate going forward yes that obviously brings in questions like what sort of Munitions are Ukraine likely to receive and in what quantities in order to inflict that burn rate but it’s also just an ambiguous question more generally if you look at the Historical precedent if you ask me whether a military having to push forward older less capable equipment to replace losses is going to increase or decrease its losses going forward at least in terms of that type of equipment in question the answer is going to be it depends if you replace higher quality Equipment and train Crews on a one toone basis with shittier equipment and Crews have got most of their training in War Thunder then all else being equal I think history suggests you’re going to get your units mulched that can then lead to pressures to replace losses even more quickly which causes you to cut down on upgrade times for equipment or training times for replacement Crews driving casualty rates yet higher and thus the cycle continues alternatively though equipment losses can to an extent be self-correcting if you start to experience serious shortage of Tanks or infantry fighting Vehicles you might start to just use fewer tanks and infantry fighting vehicles and if you don’t use them it becomes considerably harder to lose them that latter phenomenon is one reason why I think it is incredibly unlikely that Russia or for that matter Ukraine ever entirely Runs Out Of Tanks infantry fighting Vehicles artillery or aircraft we can expect that they’ll naturally use them less and be more cautious with them as Supply starts to contract at that point though you might argue the difference between that and and having the equipment destroyed is largely academic it’s hard to generate much in the way of Battlefield effect with equipment you never use another significant question mark is whether Russia can expect to receive any sort of significant resupply in any equipment category foreign ammunition supplies have been absolutely critical so far to allowing Russia to maintain a volume of fire superiority over Ukraine and there are countries out there that may or may not rhyme with course in the Rea that do have significant stocks of everything from tanks and infantry fighting vehicles to apcs and artillery pieces as long as you’re not too picky about quality control it’s interesting to note how closely that consideration mirrors those on the Ukrainian side where future decisions around foreign aid and arm Supply are likely to be some of the biggest drivers of Ukrainian combat power going forward but for all those caveats it’s worth noting that there are limits and potential critical dependencies there are things a military like the Russian one might be able to readily substitute to an extent an ancient tank might be able to sort of stand in for a modern one a wield BTR might not be a one toone substitute with a tracked BMP but it can kind of do some of the job but it’s hard to imagine either the Russian or Ukrainian forces ever being able to effectively fight on if they ever run out of something truly critical whether that be air defenses artillery Munitions or other Mission critical elements so while there are a huge number of unknowns going forward and ultimately only time will tell if things continue as they are I’d suggest that Russia’s ability to regenerate certain parts of its equipment stock are going to start to significantly grade going forward for some systems there may never be meaningful Supply constraints but for others we might start to see meaningful pinch points as soon as 2025 in a sense the ukrainians have already burned through a lot of the Russian army now to a significant extent at least in equipment terms they’re increasingly fighting a Soviet Army that just happens to have a lot of drones but I think there’s an argument to say here that the burn rate is absolutely essential if Russia is allowed to exhaust its equipment only slowly over time there’s going to be room for adaptation with that means industrial expansion so older vehicles can be more readily restored or things like substituting waning Barrel artillery stocks using more mrls or air delivered Glide bombs the great challenge of only providing Ukraine with Munitions or capabilities incrementally is that it has given the Russian military time to adapt both in terms of its tactics but also in terms of its industry so far those adaptations have been nowhere near enough to overcome the overall rate of loss but if Ukraine isn’t properly supplied there’s no guarantee that doesn’t change so for the moment I think there are a few observations we can cautiously make firstly that in the here and now the Russian military still likely holds a significant material advantage in Ukraine we’ve arguably seen a number of those advantages compound together and Ukraine is still probably in a window of deep vulnerability but at the same time I think there are more and more question marks around that Advantage the longer fighting goes on as it has if the production repair reactivation and lost pictures continue more or less as they have statistically Russia will run some of its storage is dry well before it reaches its stated territorial goals but that scenario as we said depends a lot on the ability of the ukrainians to keep up the fights and the intensity and that in turn is probably a topic for a future video and okay quick Channel update to close out with an apology if my voice today still sounded a little bit rough around the edges I am feeling much better now than I have been over the last couple of weeks but my recovery and my voice still aren’t entirely there yet hopefully soon thank you very much to the patrons who voted for this topic this one took a na b a second in a recent poll I did but because of the way the data collection and preparation process came together it just ended up making sense to push this one to the front of the list all of the topics they voted for should be produced eventually though so stay tuned my closing thoughts on this episode is that I didn’t want to continuously harp on the caveats and the issues of the fog of War throughout this episode those are all things I hope that you’ve all heard before many times at this point but I do think it’s important to understand that when we do exercises like this one that we shouldn’t embrace any sense of false Precision at the same time I do think these exercises have value usually the details the numbers and things like this are going to be incredibly ambiguous but the big picture Trends can sometimes be considerably clearer in any case I hope you found this episode useful interesting and engaging and that you’re looking forward to the corresponding episode on Ukrainian losses and for status in the near future as always thank you very much to all of you for your ongoing engagement and support and I hope to see you all again next week