Ukraine has become a graveyard of Russian tanks

Moscow’s military has lost more than 230 of its heavily armored tracked vehicles since its invasion of Ukraine on February 24, according to the Oryx Blog, an open-source site that tracks military-equipment losses. Many were destroyed. Others were abandoned, captured or damaged, Oryx says.

Ukraine’s government says it has collected an even higher toll and claims it has destroyed more than 400 Russian tanks and several less armored military vehicles.

Before the war, Russia had about 3,000 heavy tanks. Ukraine started the war with about 850 tanks. Neither side said how many tanks it lost.

Analysts say the bulge of battlefield armor in recent weeks represents the largest number of tanks destroyed in such a short period of time since World War II. In that conflict, the most effective way to destroy a tank was with another tank.

Today, Ukraine relies on more compact and agile weapons, including Turkish-made armed drones and US-made Javelins and other infantry-propelled antitank missiles. High-tech gear has taken a surprisingly large toll on Russian tanks, armored vehicles and supply columns from a small number of Ukrainian troops.

The White House said this week that it would provide Ukraine with another $800 million in weapons, including several tank-destroying weapons that have proved so destructive against Russian armor. The package includes 2,000 spears and 7,000 other anti-tank weapons. The US also said it would provide 100 lethal Switchblade drones.

In response, Russia may be adopting its own battlefield strategy and trying to better coordinate forces—a weakness they have displayed that has exposed them to attacks.

“They are ineffective in joint armed operations,” said retired General H.R. McMaster, a former national security adviser in the Trump administration.

But the strategy of reform only goes against new technologies, history shows. The competition between tanks and systems to disable them has been going on for decades.

Tanks first entered the battlefield in World War I and played a central role in World War II. Russia’s tank operations in that conflict, which helped defeat Germany, are among the most telling of the Industrial War era.

The largest tank battle took place in 1943 in the north of Ukraine, near the Russian city of Kursk, and involved about 6,000 German and Soviet tanks, thousands of aircraft, and an estimated two million soldiers.

The German blitzkrieg strategy demonstrated the power of combined attacks coordinating armored vehicles with infantry and air support. Most tank-led attacks since then have used similar tactics, including both the 1973 Yom Kippur War between Israel and its Arab neighbors and the US-led Gulf War.

“To maximize the usefulness of the tank, you’ve got to use it in a combined armed force with infantry and infantry armored vehicles” and other elements, said Ben Barry, of a British armored infantry battalion. A former commander now at the International Institute for Strategic Studies think tank in London.

After heavy fighting between World War II tanks, the Soviet Union churned out a large number of tanks during the Cold War. The US, unwilling to compete directly with Soviet weapons production, instead developed other methods of outfitting armored military vehicles.

The A-10 ground-attack jet, introduced in the mid-1970s and known as the Warthog for its unusual appearance, was designed to fly low and enemy targets. It uses bombs, missiles and powerful machine guns capable of firing exceptionally dense ammunition that takes advantage of speed to penetrate armor.

The AH-64 Apache attack helicopter, introduced into service a decade later, was designed to perform similar tasks, but with greater maneuverability.

Now, drones and shoulder-mounted systems want to do the same, but with an even smaller, more portable and autonomous system.

“Those two weapons, in particular, allow Ukrainians to really get stuck there, forcing the Russians to stop and reevaluate,” defense industry adviser Nicholas Drummond said.

Those advances mean tank warfare—especially Russia’s approach—needs to be adapted to prevent damage. But military experts say the tanks are likely to play a bigger role in ground warfare.

Russia’s tank losses in Ukraine “are not lacking in tanks relative to infantry,” General McMaster said. “This is the inability to fully utilize artillery infantry and armored forces.”

General McMaster said that without heavy armor, forces are extremely vulnerable to enemy artillery, something Ukraine experienced when Russia invaded Crimea in 2014 and occupied the region. Russian forces were then able to “hit everything that was not heavily armored,” he said.

Advancing forces against infantry are protected inside and behind tanks, which use their cannons to repel the enemy. The US and its allies effectively used tanks or lightly armored vehicles in the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Russian tanks being destroyed by Ukrainian forces appear to lack the innovations that Western forces are deploying, such as blowout panels that release the pressure of an internal explosion and therefore reduce the risk to a tank and its crew. do, said Veli-Pekka Kiwimaki, a lecturer in geospatial intelligence at Johns Hopkins University.

Other technologies are being developed to help tanks survive on the modern battlefield. Israel’s trophy system, which aims to detect, intercept and destroy incoming projectiles, is one of them. Warships have carried active defensive systems for years. Shrinking them for tanks and designing them to operate at close range posed technical challenges that armies are overcoming.

This is a lesson that is not lost on Moscow. Russia has said that its latest tank, the T-14 Armata, which has not yet entered operational service, has an active protection system.