Ukrainian claims about Russian losses- some statistics

If you believe Ukraine's statistics, Russia might be in trouble

TLDR: We cannot know if Ukrainian figures for Russian equipment loss are even remotely accurate. However, if they are, and if Ukrainian defenses are not going to collapse soon, Russia is in a lot of trouble. Depending on your point of view, this could be evidence that Russia is in a lot of trouble, or that Ukraine is badly wrong about Russian equipment loss.

The Kyiv Independent daily publishes the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence’s claims about Russian losses. I’ve aggregated them all in the table below. Unfortunately, Substack doesn’t allow posting tables so I could only provide an image.

I’ve insisted on strict comparability. For example, on the 10th of March statistics about cars were replaced with statistics about vehicles, hence I ceased this statistic.

How far can we trust these figures? I don’t know. Let that be the main takeaway from this article. I will say that the idea that these statistics are at least plausible is bolstered by Oryx, a website that documents equipment losses using another methodology- only losses demonstrated by video or photograph online are counted. Oryx counts about half the losses as the Ukrainian defense ministry does. Given that not all real losses will be visually documented online, this raises my credence that Ukrainian figures might be at least in the ballpark. It is worth noting though that the Oryx figures contain some double and triple counting, as it can be hard to tell from online videos and photographs whether two images contain the same piece of destroyed or captured equipment.

Now let’s zoom in on some interesting daily losses figures (according to Ukraine!):

Everything I have presented so far has been a summary of publicly available claims. I have maintained an appropriate distance and emphasized that these claims are claims of the Ukrainian government, not me. What follows is much more speculative. A purely an intellectual exercise based on a methodology of Fermi estimation, designed to guesstimate how long Russia can last if these figures are real and continue as are. We’ll start with tank losses.

Is Russia’s rate of tank loss sustainable?

The 27th and 28th seem like outliers to me, an artifact of war just begun. Across all categories, Russia seems to have taken heavier losses average losses per day in February than it has been in March. So discarding February and taking the average of the other days we can average the rate of loss to about 15 Russian tanks a day. A common figure is that Russia has 12,000 tanks. Theoretically then we can entertain the counterfactual that Russia could sustain this rate of loss for 800 days. However:

1. I am not sure that all of these tanks are operational- many might work only on paper.

2. I cannot find an estimate of how many tanks Russia has in Ukraine, however, I would guess since it faces other threats and has a large border, and since only about a quarter of its troops are in Ukraine, most of its tanks are probably not there. [Some early figures suggested 1200 Russian tanks were massed at the Ukrainian border very late in 2021, but we’ll assume the number has risen drastically since then]

3. Most critically, Russia would decide that losses had become unacceptable well before it had lost its last tank or perhaps even a third of its tanks in Ukraine. This isn’t Red Alert. You can’t and don’t keep fighting till your last tank is blown up. It’s very hard to know what casualties would be considered unacceptable.

Another figure that sometimes gets tossed around is an estimate of 3000 operational tanks for the whole Russian army. A friend has noted that based on the number and type of brigade tactical groups one might expect 1000 tanks in Ukraine, which, if true, combined with these Ukrainian figures, would suggest the Russians are in a lot of trouble.

I’ll leave setting the parameters to the reader, but I was surprised by how quickly a reasonable Fermi estimate indicated that Russia could lose more tanks than it’s comfortable with at least if these Ukrainian figures are worth a damn. Of course, in the event of Russia losing a significant portion of its tanks in Ukraine, Russia would presumably correct this by transferring tanks from elsewhere, but this could create other problems. On some parameter estimates, Russia might not even be able to keep this up for another 50 days.

Another thing that is worth highlighting is helicopter losses. A common figure for Russian military helicopters is 500. According to Ukraine, Russia has lost 83 helicopters. If Russia has deployed even as much as half its helicopter fleet to Ukraine it’s already lost a third of that. Suppose Ukranian figures are twice as large as reality, well it’s still lost a 1/6th of its helicopter forces in Ukraine.

What about Armored Personel Carrier (APC) losses? APC losses come out to about 32 a day during March.

How long can Russia sustain this? How many APCs does it have? As far as I can tell, Russia has approximately 30,000 armored vehicles including 12,000 tanks. This puts a maximum possible cap of 18,000 APCs. I’m eyeballing through Russian military equipment inventories right now and a reasonable estimate is that 2/3 of the armored vehicles which aren’t tanks are APCs. Overall, on this model, Russia would have 12,000 APCs, the same number of APCs as tanks.

Suppose Russia had 4000 of those APCs active in Ukraine. If it kept losing them at this rate it would face a serious deficit (50% of total inventory in Ukraine lost- 2000 APCs) in just 26 days. Assuming that Ukraine can stay in the fight and keep inflicting losses at the rate it has been, and of course, assuming that Ukraine’s figures are at least approximately accurate, Russia is in trouble.

Of course, this raises the question of how long can Ukraine sustain its equipment losses?

It’s hard to know because we do not have good figures on these. However there are two factors which mean Ukraine might last longer than these figures would indicate in any case: viz: 1. Ukraine is being resupplied by NATO 2. The website Oryx documents equipment losses using another methodology - online footage and photographs. From what they have documented, it seems like the Ukrainians are stealing a lot of equipment from the Russians- about 42% of the total loss by the Russians. Because of Oryx’s methodology, this is likely an upper bound (captured material is more likely to be shown off online than destroyed material). Nonetheless, it seems likely the Ukrainians are taking strategically significant amounts of material. It helps that Ukraine and Russia use a lot of the same stuff.

On these figures Is there any evidence the Ukrainians are slowing down?

Hard to say. However looking at tank losses and APC losses- which have the merit of being important enough to be recorded, but frequent enough that the distribution should be relatively smooth, we see, after March, a pretty consistent rate of losses. This would suggest that Ukrainian losses since the start of March haven’t reduced the Ukrainian capacity to inflict losses on the Russians.

But as always, we add the caveat if the data is accurate.

Among the most potent weapons in the Ukrainian arsenal is the tractor

Appendix: Kyiv Independent Infographics