“A lot of tank losses are happening because tanks are damaged or have some mechanical malfunction and are later destroyed because they can't be recovered,” Janovsky said.Īs the conflict in Ukraine became a war of attrition in the country’s east and south, Moscow has begun taking old tanks out of storage. Of the 1,012 Russian tank losses documented by Oryx in an update Saturday, 34 percent were abandoned by their crew, a high percentage that military analyst Rob Lee attributed to poor planning and logistical failures in an article Tuesday. In particular, Ukrainian forces used portable Western-supplied anti-tank weapons to destroy advancing Russian columns, including many tanks, in the areas north of Kyiv. “In the first month Russia lost an insane number of tanks and other vehicles because the Russians were spread so thin over a huge area of Ukraine,” he said.

“Losses have fluctuated throughout the conflict,” said Jakub Janovsky, a contributor to Oryx’s tally, which is based on open source information.

Over half of Russia’s tank losses recorded by Oryx, which verifies destroyed, captured or abandoned tanks using open source information, occurred in the first 50 days of the war as Russian forces attempted to seize the Ukrainian capital. Russian tank losses in Ukraine have passed 1,000, according to the Oryx intelligence blog that tracks equipment losses in the fighting, highlighting the attrition suffered by Russian forces in more than six months of war.

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