Russians rely on armor from storage, but it will not last long

Russian troops are relying heavily on repaired tanks and armored vehicles pulled from storage to replace their losses. However, it is likely that the Russians will not be able to sustain these losses in the long term.

This was reported by RBC-Ukraine with reference to a report by the American Institute for the Study of War (ISW).

The report cited information from Viktor Kevliuk, an expert at the Ukrainian Center for Defense Strategies, who noted on November 13 that Russian troops continue to produce and restore about 150-160 new tanks per month, or about 1,920 tanks per year. This is roughly equal to the current replacement rate of Russian equipment losses.

According to the Dutch open-source project Oryx, Russian forces have lost about 3,558 tanks since the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022.

Kevliuk stated that about 30 percent of all Russian tanks produced in a year (about 567 out of 1344 tanks produced in a year) are newly manufactured tanks, and the remaining 70 percent are taken out of stock by Russian troops. The expert also noted that, according to the latest estimates of British intelligence, if Russia continues to remove tanks and armored combat vehicles from warehouses at a similar pace, it will exhaust its own stocks by the fall of 2025.

In February 2024, the British International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) estimated that the Russian army could probably withstand about 3,000 annual losses of equipment for at least the next two to three years by reactivating vehicles from storage.

Ukrainian military observer Kostyantyn Mashovets has previously estimated that the Russian defense industry can produce about 250-300 new tanks and repair another 250-300 tanks a year.

Author - Dmitriy Levchenko, 14/11/2024