Russian Tanks Ukraine – Fighting around the town has been ongoing since March 2022, but has been escalating since Jan. 24 when Russia launched a renewed offensive. It’s seen as the first part of an expected spring offensive, and so far is not going well.
Exact losses are unconfirmed; Ukraine’s military claims that in mid-February Russia lost 36 tanks. British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace claimed, citing reports, that a Russian brigade was “effectively annihilated” and 1,000 fighters killed between Feb. 14-15.
Russian Tanks Ukraine
Despite those losses, Russia is continuing its push, and with that still trying to move its armor forward, directly into Ukrainian landmines. And the results are the same. Videos show lead tanks getting disabled and the following tanks struggling to maneuver without meeting the same fate.
This assumes that every BTG is at 100% fighting strength, which has historically never been the case. Go back to Roman times and you find that while on paper a Legion had 5,000 men, by Julius Caesar’s time the actual number was more like 3,500.
For any army, the full establishment is a theoretical ideal which is rarely if ever achieved in reality. The BTG also has its own air defense assets, in the form of three personnel carriers carrying teams with man-portable missiles, plus two batteries of three mobile surface-to-air missile launchers with their attendant radar and control vehicles.
Smoke rises from a Russian tank destroyed by the Ukrainian forces on the side of a road in Lugansk … [+] region on February 26, 2022. – Russia on February 26 ordered its troops to advance in Ukraine “from all directions” as
the Ukrainian capital Kyiv imposed a blanket curfew and officials reported 198 civilian deaths. (Photo by Anatolii Stepanov/AFP) (Photo by ANATOLII STEPANOV/AFP via Getty Images) Tanks are the military descendants of cavalry, whose job was to race forward in battle and break up defensive lines.
If there are no battles and no defensive lines to break up, tanks are not very useful. They’re just fuel-sucking targets, blown apart by shoulder-fired missiles and Turkish drones, symbols of this new era we find ourselves in.
Predictably enough, the Ukrainian government claims the Russians have suffered even higher losses. They put the figure at 374 tanks and 1,226 other armored combat vehicles as of Monday. This would give a total of 1,600.
A BTG has one tank company of ten tanks, and three infantry companies. This would typically include one company with ten BMP tracked infantry vehicles and two with ten BTR wheeled personnel carriers each. This gives a total of 40 armored vehicles in the front line.
Against this we need to set the fact that Russia has plenty of old or obsolete military equipment tucked away in vehicle parks and warehouses that can be used to make up shortfalls or which can be reactivated and sent creaking into battle to replace losses — if there are
still crews to operate them. Some estimates put the Russian grand total as high as 12,420 tanks and 36,000 other armored vehicles. The IISS estimates Russia has over 10,000 tanks in storage plus many other vehicles.
Or we focus on what we feel obliged, as human beings, to consider: the suffering of the Ukrainian people. The hardships facing millions of refugees. The risk to ourselves in this delicate geopolitical moment, with Russia begging China for arms, and European leaders traveling to embattled Kyiv.
Behind them is a formidable array of artillery: typically three batteries of two 152mm self-propelled guns, two batteries of three multiple-launch rockets with reload vehicles, and two batteries of three 120mm heavy mortars. Artillery, which Stalin termed the ‘God of war,’ is likely to inflict more casualties than the front-line troops.
Mines have played a key role in the fighting in Ukraine over the past year. After their initial invasion last year failed to take Kyiv, Russian forces pulled back, mining roads and fields. Groups are working to de-mine those areas to make them safe for civilians.
A worker welds metal inside the Interpipe Steel plant in Dnipro, Ukraine on March 10. With hundreds of its employees joining the fighting, skeleton crews at some Interpipe facilities are making metal barriers to block Russian tanks and convoys.
Russian tank crews have jury-rigged metal cages over their turrets, hoping they’ll deflect anti-tank rockets. But mostly the effect is psychological — imaginary rather than actual protection. Western analysts called them “emotional support cages,” with The Economist comparing them to the ghost shirts of Lakota warriors that were supposed to stop bullets but didn’t.
To start with, we should be clear that we are talking about armored vehicles in general. While journalists sometimes use ‘tank’ to describe any military vehicle, it is only properly applied to tracked vehicles whose main function is fighting other tanks.
There are plenty of other armored fighting vehicles, ranging from reconnaissance vehicles to self-propelled guns and infantry carriers. Actual tanks only make up a fraction of the numbers and the combat power. War is always unpredictable and the situation may change rapidly.
Ukrainian resistance is grinding down the Russian war machine, which is responding with greater brutality. The weeks ahead are likely to see continued heavy casualties on both sides. One thing we can say is that Russia cannot continue to sustain this level of casualties for long.
Some armies do occasionally reach 90% of their official strength, but in practice many vehicles are not serviceable, or have been loaned out to make up a shortfall elsewhere, or a unit is waiting for new equipment.
Back in 2016, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoygu claimed that his tank units had a serviceability rate of 94%, indicating that proportion would be ready to fight on any given day. This number was widely considered to be an exaggeration.
In the U.S., M-1 Abrams units in the 1980s aimed at 90% but sometimes sank as low as 54%. We have already seen the Russian response. Rather than sending troops into built-up areas where fighting is likely to be intense, they have started bombarding them from long range with rockets, artillery and airstrikes.
This has little military effect but causes horrendous civilian casualties and is aimed at breaking Ukrainian morale without too many Russian losses. The same approach may eventually drive Russia to use chemical weapons. Bakhmut is also where the Kremlin-aligned mercenary organization the Wagner Group has been leading the push, suffering heavy losses along the way, many of which are from the convicts recruited into the group.
Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin is currently in a war of words with the Russian military, accusing it of not supplying his organization with ammunition. As part of that conflict, he is posting photos of dead Wagner soldiers in Bakhmut, giving a glimpse at how severe Russian losses are in the battle.
The town itself has been shattered by the fighting, with buildings bombed out and streets abandoned. In addition to its armor, the BTG also has quite a support train, with 11 ammunition trucks, five tankers for fuel and lubricants, four battlefield ambulances and five maintenance and repair vehicles.
The total typically comes to 57 unarmored vehicles. Before the invasion, the final estimates from official U.S. sources put the Russian forces at approximately 120 Battalion tactical Groups, or BTGs. A BTG is a Russian battlegroup able to operate independently, a self-contained combined arms force with tanks, infantry, artillery, air defense as well as its own logistics, maintenance and support facilities.
The Russian army as a whole could generate perhaps 160 BTGs in total, so 120 – 75% of the complete force – is perhaps the largest expeditionary force that could be assembled, and this assessment has not been seriously challenged.
It’s too early to tally, but this disaster might not be without benefits. Putin has harmed himself in a way his enemies never could, exposing the weakness of the Russian system, once again, a lesson that Americans seem to need to learn anew every generation.
I can’t help but think the Chinese, viewing this as a chance to gauge the West’s reaction to their longed-for seizure of Taiwan, must be re-considering the wisdom of blowing up decades of international success so they can swallow a bauble it
never possessed yet they imagine is rightly theirs. Every day, new pictures of destroyed, abandoned or captured Russian vehicles parade across our screens. There may seem to be a lot, but are they just drops in the ocean?
How much Russian armor is there in Ukraine right now and how much of it has been lost? The answers are not simple but we can make some decent estimates. Along with its own Soviet-era mines, Ukraine has a supply of American remote anti-armor mine systems, which the United States provided approximately 6,000 of in late 2022. Right now, Ukrainian forces at Vuhledar are outnumbered when it comes to armor — the
first Leopard tanks donated by Poland arrived in Ukraine on Friday — but the last two weeks have shown its mines are enough to hold back Russian tanks, at least for now. The U.S. Department of Defense estimated that Russia was losing about 50 vehicles per day.
On March 8 they put the Russian losses at “8% to 10% of military assets.” By Sunday they put the total vehicle losses at 184 tanks and over 380 other armored vehicles (a total of 564).
Saying that this is more than 8% of Russian forces suggests they believe the grand total is much less than 10,000. TOPSHOT – This general view shows destroyed Russian armored vehicles in the city of Bucha, west of … [+] Kyiv, on March 4, 2022. – The UN Human Rights Council on March 4, 2022, overwhelmingly voted to create a top
-level investigation into violations committed following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. More than 1.2 million people have fled Ukraine into neighboring countries since Russia launched its full-scale invasion on February 24, United Nations figures shown on March 4, 2022. (Photo by ARIS MESSINIS / AFP) (Photo by ARIS MESSINIS / AFP via Getty
images) That was clear on the first day of the war, when Google Maps flagged the traffic problems caused by Russian tanks crossing the border. The tanks are almost a subconscious leveling of the playing field between the behemoth Russia and Ukraine, since a T-14 Armata costs $3.7 million, 20 times the price of a Javelin missile, at $175,000.
If all the BTGs were at full strength, then they would have a complement of 10,200 armored vehicles. There are some additional vehicles at higher command levels: artillery and air defense units plus a number of other units such as the irregular separatist forces.
But this 10,200 represents the likely bulk of Russian armor. By Nicholas Slayton | Published Feb 25, 2023 3:07 PM EST War offers a chaos of detail. As we sit and watch, we choose which story lines to absorb, which to ignore.
Focusing on what feels good: the heroism of the Ukrainian resistance, the courage of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the unexpected severity of sanctions imposed by governments and businesses. When McDonald’s steps into the fray, you know something unusual is happening.
That’s why the Russians are indiscriminately shelling cities. Because, unlike the Ukrainian military, apartment buildings are big, stay in one place and are easy to hit. As to what that does, other than kill civilians and stoke international outrage, I can’t imagine.
Ukraine’s success so far will encourage allies to put even more anti-tank weapons into Ukrainian hands on top of the 20,000 already promised or delivered. One U.S. Special Operations official monitoring the conflict estimated that around 300 Javelin missiles fired had destroyed 280 vehicles.
Again this may be optimistic but it is an indication of just how effective these weapons are (and Russian ‘cope cage’ add-on armor does nothing to stop them). When the first images of burning Russian tanks started flitting around Twitter, as well as Ukrainian farmers towing tanks with their tractors, I wondered how the supporting infantry accompanying the tanks let the Ukrainians get close enough to destroy them.
One year into the war in Ukraine, the conflict does not appear closer to ending, and Russian tanks appear no better at avoiding destruction. Armored forces attempting to take the Ukrainian town of Vuhledar are being decimated by landmines.
Rather than symbols of strength, all those tanks are an argument for how weak and disorganized the Russians have been. They can barely invade Ukraine, never mind face NATO and the United States. Russia went into this folly without a plan and, apparently, without adequate supplies, not only of fuel but food, water and ammunition.
Some tanks did not have to be destroyed; they were merely abandoned. The real figure is likely to be above the 604 of Oryx and below the optimistic Ukrainian claim, so the U.S. 8-10% estimate may be accurate.
The U.S. Army takes as a rule of thumb that 30% losses are enough to effectively destroy a BTG, but commanders will rotate units and take them out of the line of battle to prevent any given BTG falling apart where possible.
Emma Nehls is a military writer and historian with a passion for exploring the intricacies of warfare and the human experience within the military. With extensive knowledge and a deep understanding of military strategy, tactics, and historical contexts, Nehls brings a unique perspective to his writings.
