(Reuters) – Russia has lost more than 3,000 tanks in Ukraine — the equivalent of its entire active pre-war stockpile — but has enough lower-quality armored vehicles in storage for years of replacement, a leading research center said on Tuesday.
Ukraine has also suffered heavy losses since the Russian invasion in February 2022, but military resupplies from the West have allowed the country to maintain stocks while improving the quality of equipment, the International Institute for Strategic Studies said.
Even after the loss of so many tanks — including about 1,120 last year alone — Russia still has about twice as many tanks available for combat as Ukraine, according to the IISS’s annual military balance sheet, a key research tool for defense analysts.
Henry Boyd, a senior researcher specializing in military capabilities, said that Russia was practically “breaking even” in terms of replacements. He estimated that the country put around 1,000 to 1,500 more tanks into service last year.
But of this equipment, he said, no more than 200 were newly built and the vast majority were older, refurbished models.
“Moscow has managed to trade quality for quantity… by removing thousands of old tanks from storage at a rate that can sometimes reach 90 tanks a month,” said the report.
Russia’s stockpiles prove that Moscow “could potentially sustain about three more years of heavy losses and secure tanks from the stockpiles, even if with lower technical standards, regardless of its ability to produce new equipment”.
The Russian Defense Ministry chose not to comment on the report.
(Reporting by Mark Trevelyan in London and Greg Torode in Hong Kong)