For Russia, the loss of thousands of tanks is an accepted cost of Putin's war in Ukraine

Days before the Russian invasion in February 2022, Ukraine’s top military leaders had a sharp message to share.

“We are ready to meet the enemy, and not with flowers, but with Stingers, Javelins and NLAWs,” the leaders of Ukraine’s army and defence ministry warned, name-checking the very weapons they would use against their invaders.

Since the beginning of the war, Ukraine has used Western-supplied anti-tank weapons, their made-in-Ukraine equivalents and drones, to hit Russian tanks on the wrong side of the border.

Russia has reportedly lost thousands of tanks to the invasion, but continues to send these hefty war machines to the front lines despite their apparent vulnerabilities.

A mural of the fictional ‘Saint Javelin’ on the side of apartment building in Kyiv last month shows the character cradling the FGM-148 Javelin anti-tank weapon that the Ukrainian army used against Russian troops in the war. (Efrem Lukatsky/The Associated Press)

Military analysts say the country is content to absorb these losses in pursuit of larger goals outlined by President Vladimir Putin, favouring a quantity-over-quality approach.

“Rebuilding an empire within the borders of the former USSR is Putin’s goal, and the loss of tanks is a perfectly acceptable price for this,” said Andrii Kharuk, a Ukrainian military historian, in an email.

The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), a London-based defence- and security-focused think-tank, believes Russia has lost at least 3,000 tanks during its Ukraine campaign. The open-source intelligence site Oryx puts the number at just under 2,850 as of the end of February.

Ukraine, meanwhile, claims to have destroyed twice this number.

An aerial view shows a group of destroyed Russian tanks, as seen near the Ukrainian village of Bohorodychne last month. (Vladyslav Musiienko/Reuters)

Old tanks, new war

Whatever the true count, Russia is looking to its Cold War inventory to source the replacement tanks it needs in Ukraine.

“Russia has a lot of tanks left over from overspending on defence during the Soviet era,” said Nick Reynolds, a research fellow at the U.K.-based Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), via email.

He says many of the tanks and armoured vehicles lost in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine date from that era and were refurbished.

Analysts say Russia’s reliance on these older machines means the quality of the tanks being sent to Ukraine is decreasing with time.

Kharuk points to known examples of T-54 tanks — which began development in the 1940s — and also post-war T-55 tanks being pressed into service into Ukraine. T-62 models, which first entered production in the 1960s, are also present on the front lines of this war.

Peter Samsonov, an author and independent tank expert, said Russia had sent T-62 tanks into Chechnya, in both wars there.

But the retooling of the older tank models, like the T-55, surprised him.

“I did not even expect Russia to have any of these [tank] chassis still available,” said Samsonov, whose Tank Archives blog provides detailed historical information on many Second World War-era tanks.

But he says Cold War-era thinking saw the Soviet Union hang onto large amounts of older weaponry such as tanks or guns, knowing that they could have have some use in the future.

Across the border

In the West, the kinds of losses Russia has seen would be fodder for potential criticism.

Robert Person, an expert on Russian politics at the United States Military Academy, said that in Russia, no such opposition can realistically occur, given Putin’s crackdown on dissent.

A boy sits on a Russian tank at a weapons exhibition during the ‘Russians Change the World’ patriotic festival in St. Petersburg last month. (Dmitri Lovetsky/The Associated Press)

In this climate, Putin can drive forward with his war plans, even if thousands of tanks are compromised in the process — not to mention the lives of Russian troops being dispatched to the Ukrainian front lines.

“I don’t think he loses any sleep over it,” Person said in a telephone interview, noting his analysis was his own and not that of his employer.

RUSI’s Reynolds sees a broader split in how soldiers’ lives are viewed in Moscow versus in Western countries.

“Young Russian men are treated, at best, as having a duty to perform to Russia regardless of the personal consequences for them, or frequently, if they end up in the less attractive parts of the Russian Ground Forces, as simply a resource to be expended,” he said.

The rise of drone warfare

Tanks have been wielded in wars across the world for more than a century. But their use in the Ukraine conflict has shown how new tools — like drones — can potentially limit their usefulness.

Kharuk, the Ukrainian historian, says Ukraine and Russia are having to deal with what drone threats mean for tanks and what can be done in response.

A woman snaps a photo of a tank-themed mural in Vladivostok, Russia, in September 2023. The tank in the mural shows the ‘Z’ letter, a tactical insignia of Russia troops in Ukraine. (Natalia Kolesnikova/AFP/Getty Images)

“Will the tanks be able to adapt to the new threat? What will be the forms and methods of this adaptation?” he said.

“And won’t this ultimately lead to a fundamental change in the very concept of a tank as a combat vehicle?”

But these are questions that have been asked for almost as long as the weapons have existed, and so far, tanks have endured.