Key Points and Summary – Russia’s military is facing a critical and potentially catastrophic shortage of armored vehicles, rendering its massive ground army largely ineffective for large-scale maneuvers.
-According to the analysis, while Russia can replenish its troop numbers through aggressive recruitment, its defense industry cannot produce new tanks and fighting vehicles fast enough to replace staggering battlefield losses, which have exceeded 15,000 units.
-Having already depleted its best Soviet-era stockpiles, the Russian army is now resorting to “meat assaults” with unarmored civilian vehicles, a desperate tactic that highlights a fatal flaw in its war-fighting capability and signals a coming crisis.
Russia Has ‘Run Out’ of Armored Vehicles
Thus far, Russia has demonstrated the ability to recruit as many as 30,000 fresh troops a month. It should be noted that Moscow is able to maintain a roughly equal number of troops that it loses in battle during the same 30-day period, resulting in a net gain of zero.
Critics argue that these recruitments are not a reliable indicator of the popularity of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Nor is Russia managing to keep up its force levels because there are throngs of young males who believe that the invasion of Ukraine is something on the order of a righteous, patriotic cause that they feel they must answer the call to.
Instead, the Russian enlistment mechanisms offer enlistment bonuses that pay better than almost any other occupation. The contracts recruits are required to sign are characterized as dishonest and sometimes lock the recruits into conditions they are unaware of.
However, even with maintaining manpower levels, the Russian military has not managed to gain any significant territory in over a year. Massive assaults and expenditures of men and material yield results that are largely inconsequential.
In one recent action, the Russian military suffered a loss of 60,000 men in a series of engagements. The accomplishment, considering the scale of combat losses, was capturing an area approximately the size of downtown Phoenix, Arizona.
Why Russia’s Effort Remains Stymied
The Russian force in Ukraine has no shortage of troops. Today, there are approximately 600,000, which is triple the 200,000 massed on the border in several locations on the eve of the Russian invasion in February 2022.
But those troops are of marginal utility when there are more than 20,000 Russian tanks, fighting vehicles, and other heavy equipment that have been lost in action and are lying about the frontlines in the form of burned hulls.
The biggest obstacle that Moscow’s military now faces is that its troops have officially run out of armored vehicles. Without armored vehicles, troops can only be used in massive, human wave attacks—what are often called “meat assaults.”
As of the beginning of this year, Russia was losing about 500 armored vehicles and other pieces of heavy equipment every month in Ukraine. Analysts looking at the numbers have estimated that more than 15,000 Russian tanks, fighting vehicles, howitzers, trucks, and other vehicles have been destroyed, damaged, abandoned, or captured.
As of today, the Russian industry builds approximately 200 new BMP-3 fighting vehicles and 90 new T-90M tanks per year, in addition to a few hundred other new armored vehicles, including the BTR-80/82 series of wheeled fighting vehicles. The vehicles lost versus replacement rates result in a vast disparity between what is required and what the industry can manufacture to send to the front.
No Replacements
For the first three years of the war, many of the replacement vehicles Moscow was putting into the line were Cold War-era vehicles taken from stocks and surplus depots. In 2022, the network of storage yards was home to tens of thousands of old tanks, fighting vehicles, and other vehicles.
In that year, the Russians began pulling the vehicles in the best condition out of storage to be refurbished. Not long after, these older T-72, T-62, and T-55 tanks, dating from the 1970s, 1960s, and 1950s, were seen on the front lines.
However, these units in storage have long been depleted, and Russian units are now resorting to using all types of civilian vehicles. The front lines are now being flooded with cars, vans, all-terrain vehicles, motorcycles, golf carts, and even electric scooters. An unarmored civilian vehicle loaded with Russian infantry racing toward Ukrainian positions is now becoming a common sight.
There are still many older Russian vehicles left in some storage yards, but many of these are even older than those that have been mobilized. Satellite analysis shows that some, if not most, of what remains in these Russian storage yards are armored vehicles that have not moved in years. At current costs, refurbishing them is not financially feasible. They are little more than scrap metal.
Russian soldiers will continue their battles on the front lines in the second half of this year. But as the number of armored units dwindles, it becomes clear that most of them will be pursuing the war on foot and without any protection in the open field.
The question is, how much longer can the military retain its unit cohesion under these conditions?
About the Author: Reuben F. Johnson
Reuben F. Johnson is a survivor of the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and is an Expert on Foreign Military Affairs and Director of the Asian Research Centre with the Fundacja im. Kazimierza Pułaskiego in Warsaw. He has been a consultant to the Pentagon, several NATO governments.
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Jim
July 9, 2025 at 11:49 pm
Russia has been using dune buggies and dirt bikes in small unit actions, due to drones, and because Kiev’s lines are stretched out, it’s more efficient & economical to take out trenches from quick flanking operations where they enter the trench from one end with firepower and roll it up to the other end.
Yes, this close attack still goes on in the 21st Century.
And it’s working, but at such a human scale that it appears as a “lava flow” as the Pentagon puts it, slow but unstoppable.
Effective drones make slow moving high value targets like tanks and full-size armored personnel carriers ineffective… or at best high casualty operations.
Light weight and fast moving is the ticket.
And Kiev’s forces are constantly being stretched further and further.
So small unit action works in a stretched out defensive line… when drones make it problematic to mass troops & vehicles.
Why is this important? Kiev is running out of troops as fast as they’re running out of Patriot missiles.
And the United States doesn’t have the weapons to replace the weapons they are losing now at the present rate of attrition… for any amount of time… unless you want to deplete our own stocks.
(You’re deluded if you want to take us to the bottom of our stocks for Ukraine… we have our own needs.)
Ukraine can rot in hell for all I care… our defensive needs come first.
I’m not worried about Russian tanks or the lack thereof.
Something’s going to snap… this Summer.