Key Points and Summary: Russia’s tank losses in Ukraine, visually confirmed by Oryx, surpass 3,600, but raw numbers alone can mislead.
-This “abacus fallacy” highlights that wars aren’t won solely by tallying destroyed equipment.

TOS-1 rocket launcher. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
-Despite astronomical tank losses, Russia’s gradual gains in eastern Ukraine demonstrate that resilience, reconstitution, and shifted tactics—fewer large-scale armored assaults—remain pivotal. Repairing and redeploying older Soviet-era tanks also cushions Russia from catastrophic depletion.
-Sanctions have hampered Russian military production, yet the incremental advance in Donbas and retracted Ukrainian progress near Kursk show Moscow’s enduring threat. While losses loom large, counting hardware alone fails to predict ultimate battlefield outcomes.
3,600+ Tanks Gone: Can Russia Still Advance in Ukraine?
It’s an image most are probably familiar with: the rusting hulk of a Russian tank, blown to bits in Ukraine — and it’s not just a couple dozen, or a couple hundred, or even a couple thousand either.
The latest numbers on Russian losses in Ukraine paint an extremely dire picture, especially looking at Russian tank losses.
The latest information from Oryx, an open-source intelligence group, says that Russian tank losses are at 3,673: 2,610 destroyed, with the rest abandoned, damaged, or captured.
These numbers are likely a conservative estimate, as the losses Oryx documents are only visually confirmed.
There are undoubtedly many hundreds of additional losses that have not been documented.
The Abacus Fallacy
One of the major pitfalls for close observers of most wars — and indeed, the ongoing war in Ukraine in particular — is the so-called abacus fallacy, conveniently summarized in a recent opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal.
The abacus fallacy is “the belief that wars are won by tallying resources. Analysts often reduce military conflict to a numbers game, focusing on troop counts, tanks or artillery rounds,” explained John Spencer, Chief of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute.
“During the Vietnam War, American leaders like Gen. William Westmoreland and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara relied on body counts to measure progress, assuming that eliminating enemy fighters would break the Viet Cong’s resolve,” Spencer wrote.

Javelin missile firing.
“The results were disastrous because the body count failed to account for the Viet Cong’s resilience and ability to recruit and replace losses. The same dynamic operated in Afghanistan. The U.S. deployed the most advanced military force in history, but the Taliban nevertheless prospered thanks to local knowledge, ideological fervor and steadfast resolve.”
The same is also true when considering the war in Ukraine. 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.
Russian Reconstitution and Other Realities
Another problem when relying on a number-only analysis, like the data provided by Oryx, is these numbers do not reflect damaged vehicles that are then repaired and brought back into service. Repair and recovery numbers could be much higher than is commonly assumed.
Another issue is the fact that despite the incredibly massive losses Russia has sustained, they are still making incremental but steady gains on the battlefield. In the east, in Ukraine’s Donbas region, Russian advances are not accelerating but have not stopped. Furthermore, Ukraine’s Kursk salient into Russia has shrunk by about half from its peak.
Sanctions on dual-use technology have crimped Russia’s ability to manufacture war materiel, which includes tanks. However, Russia has been able to pull older Cold War-era legacy Soviet tanks from storage and press them into service in Ukraine, though those tanks do not necessarily see service at the bleeding edge of the front line as is commonly assumed.

T-90M. Image Credit: Vitaly M. Kuzmin.
A Different Strategy
Russian assaults now against Ukrainian forces on the front do not often rely on massed formations of tanks or other armored vehicles but are smaller, dismounted infantry assaults, making reliance on tank losses as a metric for the direction the war is going inherently unreliable.
Russia’s tank losses have indeed been astronomical; it is also true that Russia has deep reserves of old, outdated tanks and other armored vehicles, and it can press into service well into the future.
About the Author: Caleb Larson
Caleb Larson is an American multiformat journalist based in Berlin, Germany. His work covers the intersection of conflict and society, focusing on American foreign policy and European security. He has reported from Germany, Russia, and the United States. Most recently, he covered the war in Ukraine, reporting extensively on the war’s shifting battle lines from Donbas and writing on the war’s civilian and humanitarian toll. Previously, he worked as a Defense Reporter for POLITICO Europe. You can follow his latest work on X.

N0N0
January 15, 2025 at 8:38 pm
The power of sanctions is grossly exaggerated. As far as weapons go, they’re not nearly potent enough.
China can make almost anything Russia needs.
Big, globally-integrated economies that trade with Russia – like China, India, and Brazil – mean Russia can acquire almost anything else it needs.
With oil, gas, food, and every other exportable natural resource imaginable, Russia will have the income to buy enough of what it needs. This income will probably suffice to make sure that the people of Moscow and St. Petersburg are well taken care of — which includes not having to see their sons conscripted to fight in Putin’s imperialist misadventure.
Seryi
January 16, 2025 at 7:46 pm
another reason of course that Oryx estimates are completely off, and that is why they don’t have any correlation to battlefield success.. One suspicious sign is that majority of troops and equipment losses are from artillery, 80% for troops, and Russians had 5-10 fold advantage in artillery, and one just doesn’t see this ratio in the Oryx numbers. Second suspicious sign is a high percentage (70%) of destroyed tanks yet what one would expect is opposite- high percentage of damaged tanks. For example, for troops, it is usually 1:3 ratio of killed/wounded, yet for tanks this ratio is reversed. Third, it is unclear how reliable this information, does Russians and Ukrainians are providing Oryx photo of their own destroyed tanks? Probably not. An there is obvious possibility of bias, drones have cameras and shells don’t. Also both sides use same soviet tanks, and it would be pretty easy for let say Ukrainians take picture of their own losses, paint Z sign and claim it was Russian? Basically Oryx seems like very unreliable site with no independent checking, and its widespread use by western media strongly implies that it is more of the propaganda site.