Russian ground forces in Ukraine lost around 365 main battle tanks in the war-torn country since Moscow launched an offensive on the eastern front lines in early October, according to a new assessment.
The Kremlin’s ground fighters achieved “only minor gains” but lost up to 365 tanks, plus 700 armored combat vehicles, the British Defense Ministry said on Monday.
On October 10, Russia embarked on an offensive on the Donetsk town of Avdiivka, which has been a Ukrainian stronghold for nearly a decade.
Moscow has slowly claimed territory around the eastern settlement, but Russian vehicle losses quickly became a defining part of the Kremlin’s attack on Avdiivka. Between Russia launching its offensive and November 28, Moscow lost more than 211 vehicles around Avdiivka, according to satellite imagery analysis by the Frontelligence Insight project. The British Defense Ministry has also suggested that Russia lost around 200 armored vehicles in the first three weeks of the offensive on Avdiivka.
However, Russia is likely able to replenish its main battle tank stocks with 100 new vehicles each month, the U.K. said. Moscow “retains the capacity to replace battlefield losses and continue this level of offensive activity for the foreseeable future.”
Kostya Liberov/Libkos/Getty Images
In the 23 months of full-scale war, Russia has lost 2,600 main battle tanks and almost 5,000 armored combat vehicles in its invasion effort, the U.K. government said in its Monday intelligence update posted to social media platform, X. Britain’s armed forces minister, James Heappey, had told U.K. lawmakers in early November that Russia had lost nearly 2,475 main battle tanks since its invasion got underway.
Newsweek has reached out to the Russian Defense Ministry for comment via email.
Moscow’s troops lost a “staggering” number of tanks in the early phase of its invasion, experts previously told Newsweek. Russia was plagued by planning and organizational failures, low morale and poor training in the initial weeks, with few experienced tank crews surviving to pass on their knowledge, analysts suggested.
But Russia’s ground forces likely lost around 40 percent fewer armored vehicles throughout 2023 than in 2022, the British Defense Ministry added on Monday. Until early October 2023, Moscow had largely been on the defensive across the frontlines throughout the year, the U.K. government said.
In mid-January 2024, Brigadier General Oleksandr Tarnavskyi, commander of Ukraine’s Tavria grouping of forces covering Avdiivka, shared an image appearing to show a snapshot of Russian military vehicles littering the fields around Avdiivka.
There are “hundreds of units of knocked-out Russian equipment” along the front line close to the town northwest of the regional capital, Donetsk City, Tarnavskyi said.
Russian forces switched to infantry-led attacks around Avdiivka to “conserve armored vehicles following the first two waves of assaults on the settlement,” the Institute for the Study of War think tank, which is based in the U.S, said in mid-December.
“The number of infantry attacks does not decrease,” Tarnavskyi said on Monday. “Armored vehicles are currently used by the enemy in small quantities to support manpower.”
“Defending the city is worthwhile as long as we exhaust the Russians,” Dmytro Lazutkin, spokesperson for Ukraine’s 47th Brigade fighting around Avdiivka, told Newsweek in mid-December.
On Saturday, the U.K. Defense Ministry suggested Kyiv would likely retain control of Avdiivka in the coming weeks, despite Russia’s “three-pronged” attack on the town.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.