Posts Tagged ‘David Axe’

Is Russia Finally, FINALLY Running Out Of Tanks In Ukraine?

Monday, July 21st, 2025

If it seems like we’ve already covered this topic this year, it’s because we did. But there seems to be more evidence now, with Russian tanks reported as non-existent on many fronts.

Reporting from Ukraine:

Here, the Russian armed forces ran out of tanks after months of reckless frontal assaults against fortified Ukrainian positions. The multi-layer Ukrainian defense destroyed thousands of Russian armored vehicles and depleted even the Soviet stockpiles that many thought were endless.

On July 8, the Ukrainian General Staff reported an extraordinary battlefield statistic: zero Russian tank losses. Rather than indicating a successful tactical shift, this unprecedented figure underscores Russia’s critical shortage of operational tanks. Russian units simply no longer possess enough tanks to risk losing them in frequent frontal assaults. Mechanized attacks, once the hallmark of Russian offensives, have nearly disappeared, replaced entirely by small-unit infantry actions and increasingly improvised tactics.

Months of relentless, suicidal assaults have decimated Russia’s armored capabilities. Especially in Donetsk and Toretsk, hundreds of Russian tanks have fallen easy prey to Ukrainian FPV drones, anti-tank guided missiles, artillery, and extensive minefields. This staggering attrition has far outpaced Russia’s capacity to replace battlefield losses.

Uralvagonzavod, Russia’s main tank producer, can currently manufacture no more than 20 to 25 new T-90M tanks monthly. Even though Russia increased production slightly from about 17 tanks per month in 2023 to roughly 25 by 2025, this limited output remains negligible compared to ongoing combat losses. Additionally, Russia has historically relied heavily on refurbishing Soviet-era models from storage, such as T-72’s, T-80’s, and even older T-62’s and T-55’s. Yet refurbishment capabilities have dramatically declined as stocks of viable stored tanks dwindle. Previously able to restore about 80 to 100 tanks per month in 2023, this number has dropped significantly to approximately 30 to 35 per month by early 2025. As a result, Russian frontline units rarely deploy tanks unless it involves an isolated, high-priority operation.

I treat Reporting from Ukraine assertions with a grain of salt. But The Military Show is also reporting that Russian tank participation in assaults has all but disappeared:

  • “Putin’s Toretsk advances have stalled out for a simple reason: Russia no longer has any armored vehicles to support its troops in the region.”
  • “There have been no armored vehicles visible for about a month and a half.” Forcing them to rely on meatwave assaults.
  • “There are no armored vehicles left in Toretsk.”
  • “Toretsk is a microcosm of an emerging armored vehicle situation that Russia is attempting to deal with throughout Ukraine. While Putin has armored vehicles elsewhere, he’s losing them at such a rapid pace that his military is on the verge of ending up completely naked.”
  • Another observer who thinks Russia is out of tanks in Ukraine is David Axe. “The former Forbes military correspondent took to Trench Art to blare the headline, ‘Mark the Date: Russia is Now Functionally Out of Armored Vehicles.’ Axe makes the point that Russia has lost around 20,000 combat vehicles since the beginning of the Ukraine war, meaning that most Russian troops no longer fight with the protection of armor on any meaningful scale. Instead, they’re lucky if they have any armor at all, with some, such as those in Toretsk, being forced to launch assaults without any sort of protection.”
  • Axe: “Russia will not have sufficient main battle tanks to conduct effective offensive operations beyond early 2026 if it maintains the same operational tempo and suffers the same losses as in 2024.”
  • Russia’s claims of producing 1,500 tanks a year are bogus. “The vast majority were tanks it had pulled out of storage and restored, cannibalizing other old tanks in the process.”
  • Logistics have also been hard hit. “Russia has been mobilizing donkeys, along with some horses, to shuttle equipment back and forth during the Ukraine war.”
  • We previously mentioned the assaults using Ladas and golf carts.

    • Covert Cabal, whose tank counting videos we’ve featured over the years, says that many formerly active bases now appear to be “ghost towns.” There are still some equipment at bases near NATO countries, but the Moscow military district appears pretty bare, which, given it’s historic role at discouraging coups, is pretty unusual.

    If Russia is essentially out of tanks and other armored vehicles to send to Ukraine, it’s hard to see how his grinding meatwave assaults can eke out enough territorial gains to continue advancing, especially with more U.S. weapons flowing to Ukraine.

    Maybe Putin should have taken trump up on his negotiations offer. Without armor, Russia may end up losing all its ill-gotten territorial gains in the next year…

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    Posted in Military, video | 11 Comments »

    Ukraine Inflicts Unsustainable Losses On Russian Aviation

    Thursday, February 29th, 2024

    Something interesting is unfolding in the skies over Ukraine’s south-central front. Over the last ten days, Ukraine has managed to shoot down no less than 12 Russian military aircraft:

    First the shootdown list:

  • “17th of February: Two Su-34s and a Su-35.”
  • “18th of February A Su-34”
  • “19th: A Su-34 and a Su-35”
  • “21st: A Su-34.”
  • “23rd: A Su-34 and an A-50.”
  • “27th: A Su-34 and a Su-34.”
  • “And today the 29th: another Su-34.”

    • For what it’s worth, Livemap says that Ukraine shot down two Su-34s today.

    David Axe at Forbes suggests that Russia’s air arm is dangerously close to collapse.

    The Russian air force lost another Sukhoi Su-34 fighter-bomber on Thursday, the Ukrainian air force claimed. If confirmed, the Thursday shoot-down would extend an unprecedented hot streak for Ukrainian air-defenses.

    The Ukrainian claim they’ve shot down 11 Russian planes in 11 days: eight Su-34s, two Sukhoi Su-35 fighters and a rare Beriev A-50 radar plane.

    But those 11 claimed losses are worse than they might seem for the increasingly stressed Russian air force. In theory, the air arm has plenty more planes. In practice, the service is dangerously close to collapse.

    Exactly how the Ukrainians are shooting down so many jets is unclear. It’s possible the Ukrainian air force has assigned some of its American-made Patriot missile launchers to mobile air-defense groups that move quickly in close proximity to the 600-mile front line of Russia’s two-year wider war on Ukraine, ambushing Russian jets with 90-mile-range PAC-2 missiles then swiftly relocating to avoid counterattack.

    But the distance at which the Ukrainians shot down that A-50 on Friday—120 miles or so—hints that a longer-range missile system was involved. Perhaps a Cold War-vintage S-200 that the Ukrainian air force pulled out of long-term storage.

    It also is apparent the Ukrainians have moved some of their two-dozen or so 25-mile-range NASAMS surface-to-air missile batteries closer to the front line. After all, the Russians found—and destroyed with a missile—their first NASAMS launcher near the southern city of Zaporizhzhia on or before Monday.

    He also suggests Russia may be flying more sorties close to the lines to follow-up on its costly victory in Avdiivka.

    This surge in Russian sorties presents Ukrainian air-defenders with more targets. So of course they’re shooting down more Russian planes.

    It helps the Ukrainian effort that Russian pilots increasingly are blind to Ukrainian missile-launches. The Russian air force once counted on its nine or so active A-50 radar planes—organized into three, three-plane “orbits” in the south, east and north—to extend sensor coverage across Ukraine.

    In damaging one A-50 in a drone strike last year and shooting down two more A-50s this year, the Ukrainians have eliminated a third of this sensor coverage, and created blind spots where Russian pilots might struggle to spot approaching missiles.

    In any event, the consequences of the Ukrainians’ recent kills, for the Russians, are dire. The Russian air force is losing warplanes far, far faster than it can afford to lose them. Russia’s sanctions-throttled aerospace industry is struggling to build more than a couple of dozen new planes a year.

    Escalating losses, exacerbated by anemic plane-production, almost certainly are increasing the stress on the surviving planes and crews. The Russian air arm isn’t yet in an organizational death spiral. But it’s getting closer.

    The numbers tell the story. On paper, the Russian air force has acquired 140 of the twin-engine, two-seat, supersonic Su-34s. Counting this year’s unconfirmed losses, the air force has lost 31 of the Su-34s.

    But 109 Su-34s still is a lot of Su-34s, right?

    Wrong, according to Michael Bohnert, an engineer with the RAND Corporation in California. Shoot-downs represent “only a portion of total losses” of Russian fighters, Bohnert wrote back in August. “Overuse of these aircraft is also costing Russia as the war drags on.”

    “In a protracted war, where one force tries to exhaust the other, it’s the total longevity of the military force that matters,” Bohnert added. “And that’s where the VKS”—the Russian air force—“finds itself now.”

    Bohnert assumed the air force went to war two years ago with around 900 fighters and attack planes and, in the first 18 months of fighting, lost around 100 of them to Ukrainian action. The problem for the Russians—besides the losses—is that the requirement for fighter and attack sorties hasn’t decreased even as the fighter and attack inventory has decreased.

    So those 800 remaining planes are flying more frequently in order to handle taskings the Kremlin once assigned to 900 planes. And that means more wear and tear, deepening maintenance needs and a growing hunger for increasingly hard-to-find spare parts—imperatives that effectively remove airframes from the front-line force.

    Given what we know of lax Russian maintenance practices, it’s probably safe to assume that considerably less of those 100 Su-34s are mission capable than would be the case in, say, the U.S. Air Force, which have mission-ready goals of 75-80%, but frequently falls short.

    A few more weeks of disasterous losses like this and Russia will be at dire risk of having what remains of it’s air campaign collapse.

    And Ukraine still has F-16s due to enter service this year.

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    Posted in Economics, Media Watch, Military, unions, video | 18 Comments »