Russia’s vast stockpiles of Soviet-era weapons are running low. It may have to scale back its offensive in Ukraine.
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The Economist writes about this in a large article.
For a long time, the war of attrition between Ukraine and Russia, whose population is five times larger than Ukraine’s, seemed to have only one end. But Russia’s much-hyped offensive on Kharkov in northern Ukraine, which began in May, is fading. Its advances elsewhere along the front line, especially in the Donbas, have been strategically trivial and achieved only at enormous cost. The question now is not so much whether Ukraine can continue the fight as how long Russia can maintain its current tempo of operations.
The key issue is not human resources. Russia seems able to continue to find about 25,000 more troops each month to maintain the front line at 470,000, although it pays more for them. The production of missiles to strike Ukrainian infrastructure is also growing rapidly.
But for all the talk about Russia becoming a war economy, with 8% of GDP spent on military spending, it is able to replace the staggering losses of tanks, armored personnel carriers, and artillery by taking out of storage and replenishing stockpiles accumulated during the Soviet era. While these stockpiles are vast, they are not unlimited.
Most intelligence estimates suggest that Russia lost around 3,000 tanks and 5,000 other armoured vehicles in the first two years of the war. The Dutch open-source intelligence site Oryx puts the number of Russian tank losses for which there is photographic or video evidence at 3,235, but suggests the real figure is “significantly higher.”
Alexander Golts, an analyst at the Stockholm Center for East European Studies, says Vladimir Putin has the old Politburo to thank for the vast stockpiles of weapons it amassed during the Cold War. He says Soviet leaders knew Western military hardware was superior, so they opted for mass production, churning out thousands of armored vehicles in peacetime in case of war. On the eve of its collapse, Mr. Golts says, the Soviet Union had as much armor as the rest of the world combined.
When then-Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu boasted in December 2023 that 1,530 tanks had been delivered in a year, he neglected to mention that nearly 85% of them, according to estimates by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a London-based think tank, were not new tanks but oldies (mostly T-72s, also T-62s and even some T-55s dating back to just after World War II) that had been taken out of storage and given a wash and clean.
Since the invasion, about 175 modern T-90M tanks have been sent to the front. NISI estimates that annual production this year could be closer to 90. However, Michael Gjerstad, an analyst at NISI, argues that most T-90Ms are actually upgrades of older T-90As. As their numbers dwindle, production of new T-90Ms this year could be as few as 28.
Pavel Luzin, an expert on Russian military capabilities at the Washington-based Center for European Policy Analysis, estimates that Russia can only produce 30 new tanks a year. When the Ukrainians captured a new T-90M last year, they discovered that its gun was made in 1992.
Mr Luzin believes that Russia’s ability to build new tanks or infantry fighting vehicles, or even repair old ones, is hampered by the difficulty of obtaining components. Tank kits that were planned before the war to be used in 2025 have already been raided, and critical equipment such as diesel fuel heaters, high-voltage electrical systems and infrared imagers for target detection were previously imported from Europe and are now blocked by sanctions.
The shortage of high-quality bearings is also a limiting factor. Chinese alternatives can sometimes be found, but they are said to not meet the same quality standards.
Moreover, the old Soviet arms supply chain no longer exists. Ukraine, Georgia, and East Germany were important centers for the production of weapons and their components. Ironically, Kharkov was the main producer of T-72 tank turrets. The number of workers in the military-industrial complex has also fallen sharply, from 10 million to 2 million, without compensating changes in automation, Mr. Luzin said.
Another major problem is the production of artillery barrels. Now, with North Korean help, Russia has plenty of shells, probably about 3 million this year—enough to outnumber the Ukrainians at least 5:1 until recently, and sometimes much more. But the downside of such high-intensity fire is barrel wear. In some hot spots, howitzer barrels need replacing after just a few months.
However, according to Mr. Luzin, there are only two factories that have the sophisticated Austrian-made rotary forging machines (the most recent one was imported in 2017) needed to make the barrels. Russia has never made its own forging machines; they imported them from America in the 1930s and looted them from Germany after World War II.
The solution was to remove the barrels from the old towed artillery and fit them to the self-propelled howitzers. Richard Vereker, an open-source analyst, estimates that about 4,800 barrels had been replaced by the beginning of this year. Mr. Gjerstad says that for multiple rocket launchers like the TOS-1A, the extended life of the barrels already means much shorter bursts of fire.
But the biggest problem comes with tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, which still play a crucial role in any large-scale ground offensive. Although the SISI estimated that Russia may have had around 3,200 tanks in storage in February this year, Mr. Gjerstad says that up to 70 percent of them “haven’t moved an inch since the start of the war.”
A significant number of the T-72s have been stored in the open since the early 1990s and are believed to be in very poor condition. Both Mr. Golts and Mr. Luzin believe that at the current rate of deterioration, the Russian tanks and infantry vehicles will reach a “critical point of exhaustion” in storage before the second half of next year.
If nothing changes, Russian troops may have to change their posture to a more defensive one by the end of 2024, Gjerstad believes. This could become obvious by the end of the summer. The dickheads’ interest in concluding a temporary ceasefire is expected to grow.
Source: Racurs
I am David Wyatt, a professional writer and journalist for Buna Times. I specialize in the world section of news coverage, where I bring to light stories and issues that affect us globally. As a graduate of Journalism, I have always had the passion to spread knowledge through writing.