The Russians Have Lost So Many Compact Cars in Ukraine That They're Now Building New Cars From the Wreckage

'We’re trying to make something out of something,' one Russian said

In late 2023, the Ukrainian army’s 4th Tank Brigade went to extraordinary lengths to kluge together a unique T-72 from the wreckage of no fewer than three different tank models.

This Frankenstein’s monster of a tank underscored Ukraine’s worsening tank crisis as its faltering southern counteroffensive, which kicked off that June but quickly got mired in dense Russian minefields, costing it hundreds of armored vehicles it couldn’t afford to lose.

A year and a half later, one Russian unit in Ukraine is doing something similar—albeit far, far sadder. It’s trying to piece together the remains of three damaged Moskvich compact cars in order to create one working Moskvich compact car, for use as an ambulance.

The Estonian-led WarTranslated team helpfully translated a video shot by an enterprising, but clearly desperate, Russian team towing a wrecked Moskvich somewhere along the 700-mile front line of Russia’s 39-month wider war on Ukraine.

“We’re trying to make something out of something,” a Russian soldier narrated. “To get the wounded out.”

“Now we’re going to make one Moskvich out of three,” he added.

The 18-month devolution—from a Ukrainian brigade piecing together one tank from the wreckage of several, to a Russian regiment piecing together one compact car from the wreckage of several—speaks to the sheer brutality of Russia’s wider war for both sides.

But especially the Russian side. In more than three years of hard fighting, the Russians have lost 17,000 armored vehicles and other heavy equipment. That’s far more than they can replace with new production, or by recovering older vehicles from long-term storage.

They’ve closed the gap between vehicle losses and vehicle generation by sending thousands of civilian vehicles—scooters, motorcycles, golf carts, cars, trucks and even at least one school bus—to the front, where regiments and brigades sometimes add anti-drone cages … and then roll them into battle.

A de-mechanized army

Civilian vehicles now account for 90 percent of the hundreds of vehicles the Russians lose in action every month. There are a lot of wrecked compact cars along the front line—enough for the Russians to begin cannibalizing the wreckage in order to build new compact cars.

Russian regiments are de-mechanizing. But they aren’t de-populating the same way. Indeed, recruiting for the Russian military is robust. “Driven by high sign-on bonuses and speculation that the war will soon be over, more than 1,000 men join the Russian military every day,” noted Janis Kluge, deputy head of the Eastern Europe & Eurasia Division at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.

The Ukrainian general staff believes its forces inflict 1,000 or more casualties on Russian forces—killed and maimed—every day, for a monthly total exceeding 30,000. In the balance, Russian manpower has been expanding ever so slightly every month in recent months.

But the troops are desperate for vehicles. So desperate that they’d endure extreme risk fetching wrecked Moskvichs from the drone-patrolled front line—and then spend potentially hundreds of hours building a Franken-Moskvich out of the parts.

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