Russia Has Lost Half Of Tanks During War, Claim Experts

Moscow forced to rely on Soviet-era armour, finds report

- Chris Stevenson

Russia is estimated to have lost almost half of its best tanks during its invasion of Ukraine, with Vladimir Putin's troops stepping up attacks in the country's eastern regions including Donetsk and Luhansk.

The assessment, from military think tank the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), suggests that Moscow's pre-invasion fleet of modern T-72B3 and T-72B3M main battle tanks has been hit particularly hard, with a loss rate of up to 50 per cent. The director general of the IISS, John Chipman, said that Moscow has been forced "to rely on its older stored weapons" thanks to production of the newer models being "slow". That means falling back on its Soviet-era tanks.

"They're producing and reactivating nowhere near enough to compensate for those loss rates. Their current armoured fleet at the front is about half the size it was at the start of the war," said Henry Boyd, research fellow at the IISS. The broader loss rate across all models of tank is thought to be around 40 per cent, the IISS said in its annual Military Balance report.

Russian forces claimed to have broken through two fortified Ukrainian defence lines on the eastern front, with Kyiv describing conditions there as "difficult". The Russian Defence Ministry said the Ukrainians had retreated in the face of Russian attacks in the Luhansk region, but did not say exactly where.