An unnamed senior U.S. defense official told The Washington Post this week that Ukraine now has more tanks on the ground than the Russians do.
“Right now, the Ukrainians have more tanks in Ukraine than the Russians do,” the U.S. official said on the condition of anonymity. “And they certainly have the purview to use them.”
While the number of tanks available at any one time is not necessarily an indicator of which side is in a better position, given that Russia is still in the process of repositioning and resupplying its troops in the eastern regions of Ukraine, it is a good indicator that Ukraine has sufficient military hardware and armored vehicles to continue fighting the Russians. At present, Russian forces are focusing heavily on the Donbas region and the cities that connect the contested land with Crimea.
Will NATO Provide More Heavy Weaponry and Tanks?
While Ukraine has received billions of dollars in American aid and military supplies in the last two months, the United States and many NATO countries have refused to directly supply tanks and aircraft to Ukraine over fears that it could be considered an escalation by Russia. Many of the new tanks used in Ukraine came from the Czech Republic in recent rounds of aid.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is coming under increasing pressure from legislators in his own country to follow the Czechs’ example and supply heavy weaponry, military vehicles, and tanks to Ukraine in future packages. During a speech in the Bundestag this week, however, Scholz defended his cautious approach and indicated that Germany could only take such a bold step with the support of other NATO forces.
Scholz said Germany had to consider its own defense needs, the risk of escalation, and whether the country would “go it alone” on supplying tanks. The speech seemed to indicate that Germany may be willing to change its policy, but only with the backing of the United States – a move that seems unlikely given President Joe Bidens’ repeated hesitance.
Russia Keeps Losing Tanks
Ukraine claims that Russia has lost more than 680 tanks in the conflict so far. The claim was contradicted slightly by Oryx, a military blog that has tracked and counted Russia’s military losses in the Ukraine invasion so far, which estimates more than 460 Russian tanks have been destroyed as well as over 2,000 armored vehicles.
Russia’s T-72 tank firing. Image Credit – Creative Commons.
Russian T-72 Tank. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
The T-90 is a Russian main battle tank (MBT) derived from the T-72, and is currently the most modern tank in service with the Russian Ground Forces and Naval Infantry. The successor to the T-72BM, the T-90 uses the tank gun and 1G46 gunner sights from the T-80U, a new engine, and thermal sights. Protective measures include Kontakt-5 ERA, laser warning receivers, the EMT-7 electromagnetic pulse (EMP) creator for the destruction of magnetic mines and the Shtora infrared ATGM jamming system. It is designed and built by Uralvagonzavod, in Nizhny Tagil, Russia.
The Rand Corporation and the International Institute for Strategic Studies claimed that Russia started the Ukraine invasion with 2,700 battle tanks.
Ukraine has successfully destroyed Russian tanks in such large numbers thanks to the help of U.S.-supplied Javelin anti-tank missiles. The missiles are effective at destroying tanks thanks to their double-warhead design. Upon impact, one warhead explodes and destroys the protective armor fitted to the top of Russian tanks before a second warhead explodes and destroys what is left underneath.
With a continued inflow of U.S. Javelin missile systems, Ukraine appears to have a chance at holding back invading Russian forces even as they regroup in the east.
Jack Buckby is a British author, counter-extremism researcher, and journalist based in New York. Reporting on the U.K., Europe, and the U.S., he works to analyze and understand left-wing and right-wing radicalization, and reports on Western governments’ approaches to the pressing issues of today. His books and research papers explore these themes and propose pragmatic solutions to our increasingly polarized society.
Bertram
April 22, 2022 at 12:56 pm
Thats strange. Sasha and the St Petersburg trolls keep telling us that all Ukrainian tanks have been destroyed.
CK
April 22, 2022 at 1:13 pm
Yes, it’s very odd. Did you check the figures correctly? I heard just this morning that 99% of all Ukrainian tanks have been destroyed.
Surely this article jests? I can’t for one moment believe our friends at Ria Novosti and the Internet Research Agency got their numbers wrong. Not for a single moment!
Surely there’s been a mistake?
Leo
June 25, 2022 at 6:43 am
Sigh… if only author ✍️ are honest ? more bullshit s shall hurts integrity of media
Alex
April 23, 2022 at 9:24 am
Ukraine no longer has its tanks – they are completely destroyed. Now the old Soviet rubbish comes from neighboring countries, which allows neighboring countries to modernize their armies.
CK
April 23, 2022 at 2:34 pm
Guess we can expect orcs in Kyiv any minute now then, right? After all, only an incompetent army can’t conquer a country without tanks?
Alex
April 24, 2022 at 4:31 am
So who is losing? Obviously not Russia.
American Colonel Martin spoke about Biden’s failure in Ukraine.
US President Joe Biden has failed in his policy towards Ukraine. This opinion was expressed in a column on The Washington Post website by retired American Colonel Wes Martin.
The head of the White House, as noted in the material, tried to prevent the Ukrainian conflict by diplomatic measures – and could not. The author referred to the statement of the former acting. CIA Director Michael Morell, who expressed the opinion that Biden’s attacks on Russian leader Vladimir Putin only “rallied the beleaguered Russian elite.” “Not a single citizen of Russia will put up with the fact that the main enemy of his state inspires him what kind of power in his country can be and what is not,” Martin quoted Morell as saying.
“Proving once again that he is nowhere near Reagan, Biden publicly called Putin a ‘butcher’ and a ‘war criminal.’ through Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin,” the author of the material noted.
Ukraine and Afghanistan are far from the only reasons why Biden’s ratings have slipped to an all-time low of 42 percent. People, Martin notes, are unimpressed by his foreign policy experience. Do not add popularity and record inflation of 8.5 percent and a sharp rise in energy prices – the harbingers of a recession.
At the end of March, NBC News published the results of a poll, according to which 53 percent of Americans believe that the country will begin a long-term recession, which will lead to the loss of American leadership in the world. When answering the question about Biden’s ability to correctly respond to the situation around Ukraine, only 12 percent of respondents expressed complete confidence in the actions of the head of administration.
CNN, in turn, reported that the confidence rating of US President Joe Biden has reached a record low. According to a generalized analysis of polls published by four organizations last week, the level of confidence in the US president is about 41%, and according to one of them – only 33%. This is a record low compared to all of Biden’s predecessors in the same period of the presidential term.
CK
April 24, 2022 at 5:54 am
@Alex – deny, deflect, obfuscate. Seriously, that’s you in a book.
Don’t look at Putin! Look at Biden! Don’t look at what we’re doing in Ukraine, look at your country! Recession, CNN, political division, look elsewhere, but please, don’t look at what is happening in Russia! Internet Research Agency script in a nutshell.
Also, poor you man, they are making you work on Orthodox Easter? The night money Sveta brings not enough to keep you guys afloat anymore? Let me know if you need any donations. I’m sure I have a few cents lying around that will be worth a fortune in roubles!
Alex
April 25, 2022 at 10:37 am
Yes, Russia has big “problems”:
There is the Donetsk People’s Republic. There is the Luhansk People’s Republic. Kherson applied to Russia for a referendum to establish the Kherson People’s Republic. God bless the Ukrainians of Donbass!
CK
April 25, 2022 at 10:45 am
Yes Alex, and Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Romania also re-applied to join the Russian Federation. In this reality, Putin has conquered his hemorrhoids, and you and Sveta live happily ever after.
It’s nice to sit back and daydream, isn’t it? ?
Alex
April 26, 2022 at 2:07 am
Slowly, in order to avoid unnecessary casualties, but confidently and kilometer after kilometer, the people’s militia of Donbass liberates Ukraine from Bandera Nazis. And all because this is the “whole world” with the Ukrainian regime:
The West failed to turn much of the world against Russia after the military operation in Ukraine began, columnist Howard French wrote in an article for Foreign Policy magazine.
According to him, many states did not support sanctions against Moscow, including such large countries as India and China.
“In fact, when counting the population of these countries, it becomes clear that the states representing the majority of humanity have not taken a position in this conflict, seeing in it the familiar echoes of the former rivalry between East and West,” said French.
According to the observer, the international political system that took shape at the beginning of the twentieth century from the very beginning gave the countries of the “third world” the status of second-class states. As an example, he cited the colonization of Africa by European countries.
“It was the work of the enslaved millions of people who grew sugar and cotton in huge quantities, cleared the land and did all other unpaid work that made the American colonies profitable for Europe, and the so-called “Old World” new and rich,” the author emphasized.
French urged not to ignore the heightened sense of justice among the former colonized peoples.
CK
April 26, 2022 at 7:16 am
Oh, so now “slow” progress is to avoid casualties? Man, you must have been getting lessons, your jokes only get better and better!
Alex
April 29, 2022 at 9:22 am
If someone wants to know the truth about the civil war in the Donbass, about all the atrocities of the Bandera clean-ups and why Russia was forced to intervene, then it is better to watch films by independent journalists. There are already many such journalists who fight for truth and freedom. For example, a documentary by the German journalist Wilhelm Domcke-Schulz.
A documentary film about the war crimes of the Bandera Nazis during the period of Russia’s special military operation to denazify and demilitarize Ukraine is in production. It will be a real information bomb, where the war crimes of Bandera Nazis will be shown and proved.
The documentary “Remember Odessa” tells how the Bandera Nazis burned Ukrainians alive and other heinous war crimes.
The documentary “To Live and Die in Donbass” tries to fill this gaping information gap in the West. He looks into the tormented soul of the inhabitants of Donbass, who really want only one thing – to live self-determining according to their own rules and values. Not submitting to foreign forces and ideologies.
In the east of Ukraine, in the Donbass, a war has been raging since the beginning of 2014. A civil war that claimed more than 15,000 lives over the years, including several hundred children. They had to die, because the national-fascist coup government in Kyiv, funded by the West, trained and militarily heavily armed, would not tolerate any resistance to their illegitimate rule, no matter the cost.
Therefore, in April 2014, the putschists deployed the Ukrainian army, supported by dozens of right-wing extremist volunteer battalions, and have since bombed city centers, residential areas, schools, hospitals and infrastructure, killing civilians.
This perennial crime has gone completely unnoticed by the Western public. Politicians and the media avoid this topic and reports about how the devil pours holy water. Because a public discussion about the crimes of the Ukrainian regime would reveal only one thing – with what mass murderers and terrorists the so-called “west of values” in Ukraine has a common language, if only to defend their goals and interests.
Lend-lease is a commodity loan, and not cheap: for all the ammunition, equipment and food supplied by the United States, many future generations of Ukrainian citizens will pay. Zelensky is driving the country into a debt hole.
CK
April 29, 2022 at 1:54 pm
Ah, I see your tactic. You add a little shitty first paragraph so it doesn’t detect your duplicate post. Is this what it has come to now, you just posting the same exact post 2, 3, 4, 5 times per article?
Wow, did they run out of paper in Russia, Alex? You guys can’t print new material? Literally using the same lines, over and over again, and now in duplicate in every post!
Are you so defeated you can’t even come up with anything new? How sad. Now the idiot is talking about lend-lease at the end of his post, because he literally just copy + pasted it from another thread, with zero relevance to this one.
Here’s a reminder:
If someone wanted to know the truth about anything in Ukraine Alex, the last person they would go to is you.
Paragraphs and paragraphs of bollocks, dubious claims about “independent journalists”, random documentarians, conspiracy theorists, deluded claims that of course, have no backup, lie after lie after lie.
Classical Kremlin troll approach. Just flood the internet, the comments, the media, with tosh, doesn’t matter what it is, just make sure you write some old nonsense. Make sure to say the claim is supported by some dude in Germany, France, the states. If it’s a “documentary” (usually from youtube) then the better.
Anything that victimises Russia, always the victim, always the bullied, never the problem. It’s always the Nazis. It’s always some pseudo-historical point.
Anyone that has had the misfortune to study your “tactics” sees the forest for the trees, the pattern of lies, disinformation, blanketing of random claims, deflection, obfuscation, and other words beyond your vocabulary.
It’s hopeless Alex. Your lies are as short as your intellect. What a pathetic job, to sit in your government shed, spreading your pathetic, government lies.
A pathetic job for a truly pathetic man. A better match could not be made in heaven.
talesof travel
May 6, 2022 at 8:56 am
WOW just what I was looking for.