The Russians Are Losing a Hundred Vehicles a Day As They Attack Everywhere All The Time
The Kremlin is apparently trying to position its battered forces for a favorable ceasefire
Losses are piling up on both sides as Russia’s Kursk counteroffensive grinds into its third bloody week. But they’re piling up faster on the Russian side of the 250-square-mile salient that a strong Ukrainian force carved out of Kursk Oblast in a surprise August assault.
On Tuesday, Andrew Perpetua—an analyst who scours social media for evidence of lost equipment in Ukraine and Russia—logged a staggering 163 destroyed, damaged and abandoned vehicles. Ninety-one were Russian. Sixty-five were Ukrainian. The rest were civilian vehicles or vehicles of unknown origin.
Russian losses in the 24 hours before Perpetua’s count were four times the daily average across Russia’s 1,000-day wider war on Ukraine. Ukrainian losses were nine times the average. Tuesday’s count was actually comparatively favorable to the Russians. Perpetua’s count on Monday tallied a whopping 115 Russian losses against 30 Ukrainian losses.
That the destruction has spiked should come as no surprise. Russian regiments and brigades aren’t just attacking in Kursk; they’re on the move all along the 800-mile front line of the wider war.
Politics explain this escalation. U.S. president-elect Donald Trump vowed to end the war within 24 hours of his election on Nov. 5. That obviously didn’t happen. So now Trump is proposing a ceasefire that would freeze the front line in place, effectively ceding to Russia potentially tens of thousands of square miles of Ukrainian soil.
The farther Russian troops advance in the next two months, the more favorable a ceasefire would be for the Kremlin. At the same time, Russian president Vladimir Putin has ordered his forces to eject Ukrainian forces from Kursk. The original deadline, Oct. 1, passed without Russian troops retaking much of the Ukrainian salient. The new deadline, Feb. 1, is 12 days after Trump’s inauguration.
It’s apparent Putin is unwilling to pause the war while Ukraine still occupies part of Russia.
The mix of losses in Perpetua’s Tuesday count is notable. Around half the Ukrainian losses were trucks and cars, which Ukrainian forces use to transport troops and resupply front-line units. Just 26 were armored vehicles.
The Russians lost a fair number of trucks and cars, too—as well as four-wheelers and motorcycles—but 47 of their losses were armored vehicles or howitzers. Among the Russian losses were 15 T-90, T-80 and T-72 tanks. That’s five times as many tanks as the Russians have lost on average every day since February 2022.
The tank massacre makes sense. The Russians are attacking, often with tanks in the lead. Repeatedly trying—and so far failing—to dislodge the Ukrainians in Kursk, the Russians are sacrificing scores of their heaviest vehicles.
How long elevated losses are sustainable for either side is hard to say. Is the end coming? Maybe. Will it be a lasting end?
Probably not. Recall that Russia’s war on Ukraine actually began in February 2014, when Russian troops seized Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula. The fighting spread to eastern Ukraine, where the front line froze in place in February 2015 as a result of the Minsk II agreement.
It was a farcical ceasefire. Low-intensity combat continued for seven years, effectively masking a major Russian build-up that began in 2021 and culminated in a second Russian invasion the following February.
Russia rarely honors a brokered peace. And smart observers would read everything the Russians are doing right now as positioning for a likely third invasion that would begin after the Kremlin rebuilds its battered field armies along a favorable front line.
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