Russia Is Running Out of Tanks to Feed Into Ukrainian Meat Grinder

The Russian army isn’t making big armored attacks any more and evidence is strong it’s because the Kremlin is losing tanks far faster than it can replace them.

The official Kremlin line contradicts that. The state-run news platform Pravda, for instance, in a November article profiling national tank production, asserted Russia’s armed forces are well-supplied with tanks and more steel behemoths are rolling off production lines every day.

Dmitriy Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, during a Nov. 22 visit of the country’s main tank factory, Uralvagonzavod, said: “ In three years, the supply of tanks to Russian troops has increased almost eight times…The Uralvagonzavod enterprise works like clockwork, a lot and sometimes around the clock.”

But battlefield accounts from frontline Ukrainian soldiers and combat units tell of a different opponent – a Russian army chronically short of armored vehicles and either running out of tanks, or unwilling to commit the tanks that it has to battle.

The last substantial Russian tank attack with close to 40 armored vehicles took place in early April 2024 in the eastern Avdiivka sector. Elements of Ukraine’s 30th and 47th Mechanized Brigades waited for a tank-tipped column to drive into a minefield and then cut it to pieces with artillery and First Person View (FPV) drones.

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In the Kremlin’s most sensitive fighting sector, where Ukrainian forces have invaded Russia’s Kursk region, high profile North Korean mercenaries took brutal casualties advancing over open fields into the teeth of Ukrainian drone and artillery strikes in the first half of January, and Russian tank support wasn’t even to be seen. In 2025, an assault by more than three Russian tanks has been a rare event.

In the eastern Pokrovsk sector – the focus of Russian assaults for months as the Kremlin has focused on conquering more territory in Ukraine’s Donetsk region – Russian tanks are almost invisible, with Russian infantry attacking on foot or riding light vehicles and even motorcycles. Monthly battle results data published by Ukraine’s 414th Unmanned Aircraft Brigade said that the unit’s FPV and bomber drones operating in that sector in January had damaged or destroyed 79 tanks, while other air strikes, in the same battles, put out of action 151 light armored vehicles and 519 civilian cars, trucks, golf carts, 4WD buggies or motorcycles used by Russian troops. 

The open-source analytical group WarSpotting, a gold standard analytical platform reviewing confirmed Russian and Ukrainian combat losses across the 1,000-kilometer (621-mile) fighting front, found that Russian tanks were confirmed burnt, destroyed or knocked in early 2025 at about half the pace of peaks in Summer and Fall 2025. The researcher Cyrus, said of those loss figures: “MBT (main battle tanks) numbers (are trending) downwards, not because they (Russian combat units) are battling better. They decrease because Ru running out of tanks.”

The OSINT researchers Jompy, HighMarsed, and Covert Cabal found that over the course of 2024, confirmed Russian tank losses fell from as many as 90 in a week in June and September to an average 40 a week in January 2025.

Russia has lost at least half of its available tanks since the beginning of the war, staggering figure of at least 3,700 tanks (visually confirmed) and possibly as many as 9,700 tanks (claimed by the Ukrainian military) – each costing Russian taxpayers between $1-3 million each, the group reported.

January research by the Ukrainian military information magazine Defense Express found that Russia’s capacity to replace those losses is only a fraction of what the Kremlin needs, with Russian industry over 2024 manufacturing 60-80 new tanks and refurbishing and modernizing another 200 tanks, some dating back to the early Cold War era.

That effective Russian tank replacement rate of 20-25 tanks/month is less than half of confirmed Russian tank losses during periods of relatively low-intensity fighting and between one quarter and one fifth of what Russian troops would need to make up losses during heavy battles, Kyiv Post research found.

Some analysts are pointing to national resolve to keep fighting and take losses, rather than raw numbers, as the critical predictor for the Russian tank’s future.

Germany-based analyst Caleb Larson, in a Feb. 1 situation estimate, wrote: “Despite the massive losses that Russia has sustained in soldiers, tanks, armored vehicles — and really, by any other metric — they are making steady, if not slow, gains on the battlefield in Ukraine. Though the numbers paint a dire picture of the situation, Russia is far from defeated.”

He said that high confirmed Russian tank losses may imply more loss of Russian fighting capacity than there actually is, because Russian forces might be repairing knocked out tanks and returning them to service.

But granular research into Russia’s tank storage and repair bases (seven big and 17 smaller) – at the outset of the war containing about 7,300 in various states of repair, is pointing towards bottom of the barrel Russian tank replacement.

By the end of 2024, 11 of those bases had been emptied completely, and the rest had reduced stocks to around half capacity, a three-year analysis of satellite imagery of those tank storage bases found.

Satellite images captured in 2021 of the 1295th Central Tank Repair and Storage Base (CTRSB), in Russia’s far eastern region, near the village Arsen’yev, showed about 300 tanks and 400 other armored vehicles on premises, about half in good to excellent condition.

December 2024 images of the base published by the OSINT researcher Jumpy showed all new-appearing vehicles had disappeared and only tank hulks, most without turrets, were still visible. A Substack-published review of the data said only 100 probably functional vehicles of all types were left at the base, of which less than ten were main battle tanks.

Researcher Jomy, in mid-December concluded: “This base (1295 CTRSB) is practically done. Maybe 1-2 more months until it is ENTIRELY depleted, but it doesn’t really matter at this point. This is just a sign of a bigger problem for Russia.”

Although Russian industry will probably be able to deliver small batches of tanks to forces fighting in Ukraine for some time, Russia’s inability to field a major tank force now, as in the past, will reduce fighting capacity and strain industry, most analysts say.

In an article entitled “War tanks running out? Russia faces alarming shortage by 2025” Bulgarian military analyst Alexander Lenkov wrote: “The grinding war in Ukraine has brought Russia’s military machine to an inflection point, where battlefield losses, economic strain, and technological shortfalls converge in a way that could redefine the country’s capacity to sustain its campaign. The enormous toll on equipment—particularly tanks and artillery—has strained even the deep reserves of the Soviet era, with production capacity faltering under the weight of sanctions and logistical challenges.”