Is Russia’s military running out of the equipment, spare parts and supplies necessary to maintain their war in Ukraine? Some reports say so, suggesting it’s because the parts are made in Ukrainian factories.
Vladimir Putin is said to be running out of missiles, tanks and aircraft, because the parts they rely on are made in Ukraine.
The engines of Russian military helicopters and key components for warships, cruise missiles and the majority of the nation’s fighter jets are all made in Ukrainian factories, the Telegraph reports.
The factories, which also produce parts for tanks and ground to air missiles, no longer supply Mr Putin’s army.
I’ve got to take this report with several grains of salt, because I assume those same factories must have stopped supplying Russia with spare parts after the seizure of Crimea and invasion of Donbas back in March of 2014. Are we to believe that Russia has failed to find alternate manufacturing sources for key military equipment for eight years? Russia’s invasion has displayed multiple levels of manifest incompetence, but it’s hard to believe they would be that incompetent for that long. (Now, could spare parts not exist due to massive corruption? That seems plausible, but it’s not the kind of thing you can count on your opponent suffering from.)
The army is also understood to be running low on arms following five weeks of sustained bombardment of Ukrainian cities.
This, on the other hand, seems quite plausible, given the well-documented logistical difficulties, and the furious rate at which Russian forces expended munitions during the initial assault.
The T-72 battle tank is one of the Russian army’s main armoured vehicles but, parts for it are understood to be manufactured in Izyum, an eastern Ukrainian city that Mr Putin’s forces have failed to capture.
The T-72 has been around since 1969. I can believe some of the high tech components for the most modern variants are in short supply, but surely they’ve have multiple source for the vast majority of mechanical parts for a long time now. And even if not, they built some 25,000 of the things, so I can’t imagine they don’t have enough mothballed tanks to provide spares, though it’s going to take time to get cannibalized parts out to field repair centers. (I’m assuming Russia has some sort of field repair capabilities, and I know Russian tank recovery vehicles were spotted on trains en-route to the theater before the war began.)
Open-source intelligence estimates suggest that Russia has lost at least 2,000 tanks and armoured vehicles, although true figures are suspected to be higher.
This I just flat out don’t believe. And indeed, when you go to what appears to be their primary source, they’re including a whole lot of trucks in that list, which aren’t counted as “armored vehicles.” The lesson here is “don’t believe anything that sounds too good to be true” and “always check the primary sources.”
Speaking of primary sources, that Oryx blog list does look pretty useful, though the nature of the methodology (adding up all pictures of destroyed equipment) is certainly suspect to manipulation.
Their summary line for Russian equipment losses as of this post “Russia – 2360, of which: destroyed: 1190, damaged: 41, abandoned: 232, captured: 897.”
Here are the individual type breakdown lines:
Tanks (405, of which destroyed: 190, damaged: 6, abandoned: 42, captured: 167)
Armoured Fighting Vehicles (274, of which destroyed: 129, abandoned: 32, captured: 113)
Infantry Fighting Vehicles (392, of which destroyed: 216, damaged: 2, abandoned: 31, captured: 142)
Armoured Personnel Carriers (81, of which destroyed: 21, damaged: 1, abandoned: 17, captured: 42)
Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) Vehicles (17, of which destroyed: 9, abandoned: 3, captured: 5)
Infantry Mobility Vehicles (76, of which destroyed: 43, damaged: 2, abandoned: 5, captured: 24)
Communications Stations (15, of which destroyed: 4, abandoned: 5, captured: 6)
Engineering Vehicles And Equipment (78, of which destroyed: 23, abandoned: 13, captured: 37)
Heavy Mortars (11, of which destroyed: 3, captured: 8)
Towed Artillery (47, of which destroyed: 9, damaged: 4, abandoned: 5, captured: 29)
Self-Propelled Artillery (72, of which destroyed: 25, damaged: 3, abandoned: 14, captured: 29)
Multiple Rocket Launchers (45, of which destroyed: 18, abandoned: 5, captured: 23)
Anti-Aircraft Guns (3, of which captured: 3)
Self-Propelled Anti-Aircraft Guns (11, of which destroyed: 5, abandoned: 3, captured: 3)
Surface-To-Air Missile Systems (42, of which destroyed: 22, damaged: 1, abandoned: 7, captured: 12)
Radars (4, of which destroyed: 1, captured: 3)
Jammers And Deception Systems (6, of which destroyed: 2, damaged: 2, captured: 2)
Aircraft (19, of which destroyed: 18, damaged: 1)
Helicopters (38, of which destroyed: 33, damaged: 3, abandoned: 1, captured: 1)
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (21, of which destroyed: 14, captured: 7)
Naval Ships (3, of which destroyed: 1, damaged: 2)
Logistics Trains (2, of which destroyed: 2)
Trucks, Vehicles and Jeeps (698, of which destroyed: 401, damaged: 16, abandoned: 59, captured: 210)
(An aside: You’ve got to hand it to those Russian miltech geeks who look at this:
And confidently declare “Oh, those are two destroyed 120mm 2B11/2S12 heavy mortars!” That’s some #DavesCarIDService level obsession there…)
Keep in mind that Russia only had some 2,500 tanks assigned to active units at the start of the war (though other estimates are considerably higher). But given well-documented Russian maintenance problems, I can well believe several units have sustained losses in excess of that necessary to impair combat effectiveness.
Keep in mind that the Soviet Union lost 83,500 tanks between 1941 and 1945 in World War II. Of course, that was a much broader theater, using much more widely-produced, low-tech tanks. Hell, two-way radios didn’t become standard Soviet equipment until 1944.
For high tech munitions like smart bombs and guided missiles, I can well believe that Russia is running low on stock that can’t easily be replenished under the current sanctions regime. And we see ample evidence that field resupply has been negatively impacted by severe logistical difficulties. But “T-72s lack spare parts because the original factory was in Ukraine” doesn’t pass the smell test.
Tags: Foreign Policy, helicopters, Military, Russia, Russo-Ukrainian War, T-72, T-80, T-90, tanks, Ukraine
The Russians have about 8,000 T-72’s in storage which can be stripped for spare parts or brought up to T-72B3M standard for issuance. The same kind of decommissioned helicopter inventory exists, as well as every other kind of military item used by the far larger USSR era Red Army.
The more interesting question is where the T-90’s are. The T-90 is actually the Russian front line tank and none have been seen in Russo-Ukraine war photos. It would appear that Putin has held back his best units to confront a NATO invasion.
Russian doctrine doesn’t rely on high-tech the way we do. To say that they are running short is like saying that we are running short on ice cream and foot powder. Yeah, it sucks to not have ice cream and some people might be sidelined by blisters and later foot rot, but it isn’t going to cost us a war.
Same for Russia. Russia can run out of smart bombs and hardly notice, because they never planned to use smart bombs in the first place.
Reporting is that those Russian massive mothballed stocks of old tanks and other equipment, upon being pulled from storage for issue to reconstituting units recycling back from Ukraine, are mostly missing parts, enough so as to require major maintenance and refit themselves to get back in issuable condition. It is an open question whether those missing parts are the result of prior backdoor cannibalization to keep active duty units equipment working, or from mothball facility staff liberating and selling off parts to enhance their standard of living.
The catch is, if you don’t use guided munitions, you have to use a much larger number of unguided munitions. Which means that you have to delivery said munitions, in quantity, to the front lines. Which has been a problem, so far.
Now, take the issue of spare parts. How many widgets did Russia bother to buy? Where were they stored? What condition are they in? How many widgets date back to Soviet production, and are they still in a usable shape? And, finally (and probably most germane to the current scenario), how do you get them from storage to a field unit? Russia’s logistical system appears to be fundamentally broken, and quite possibly corrupt as well.
It’s somewhat jarring to see a war fought this way, because we’re so used to seeing US technology *and* US logistics. That doesn’t mean that Russia can’t still win, but they’ll have to win “ugly”, which likely means a long, slow slog from city to city, trying to delivery enough artillery shells to Grozny the place. Once the mud clears up, it’ll be a lot easier, but Russia is also in a race against time because of its economy. They were apparently relying heavily on Western components and expertise for everything from drilling for oil to building tractors, in no small part because corruption had hollowed out their internal development and production. How long until enough parts and pieces break that whole factories, even entire industries, simply collapse? Can Russia take all of Ukraine (which they need, to establish a defensive line in the Carpathians) and get the sanctions removed before things get so bad that Putin accidentally shoots himself in the back of the head?
There are credibility effects when the author posts howlers like “Hell, two-way radios didn’t become standard Soviet equipment until 1944.” One of the great advantages of American Lend-Lease Shermans was that they DID have two-way radios. AFAIK, two-way radios in Russian tanks were confined to company commanders’ tanks (and higher) until at least 1980, and possibly not until after the fall of the USSR.
Various points – no, the Russian Army today does not have field repair centers for tanks. Something like 2/3 of all Russian tanks in storage lack engines and main guns due to corruption, and the rest require significant time-consuming renovation before use. The easy-fix ones have already been pulled out.
Construction of new tanks has been halted due to lack of critical components from Western sanctions. This applies to a lot of Russian AFV, notably air defense and electronic warfare.
While thousands of potentially useable Russian tanks remain in storage, it will take too long for any significant numbers of those to be available for this war. The Russian army must make do with the ones it already has in field service for the duration of the 2022 Ukraine war.
In support of the claims that large number of tanks have been stripped, either legitimately or illegitimately is this story from the NY Post that the commander of the 13th Regiment of the 4th “Panzer” (armored?) division killed himself when he found out only one tenth of the tanks in storage were capable of operating.
https://nypost.com/2022/03/29/russia-commander-kills-himself-after-units-tanks-dismantled-ukraine/
It’s reported by Ukraine so take it as you will, but it’s consistent with
I want to take that Oryx blog list, compile all the “captured” items, and declare they were taken by Ukrainian farmers.
After all, Ukrainian farmers are the 3rd largest army in the country!
As the Aggies say, Farmers fight! Whoop!