Richard Vereker Profile picture
Tracking Russian military equipment losses, Visualising and analyzing how that evolves in charts. Contributor to 'Tracking Russia’s losses' website.

Oct 5, 2024, 8 tweets

1) Russia is visually confirmed to have lost 6,065 IFV and APCs (by @WarSpotting ) I have created (re-created) this graph of their losses, by type, each month as a % of the total. It's a bit confusing so here is a thread, braking it down a bit, to make more sense.

2) In the first graph, I have used each month, for the next few I use a 'mid-point 3-month rolling average' So that March 23, is the Feb, Mar, Apr, added together, and April is Mar, Apr, May, and so on. Except Feb 22, is just Feb and Sep 24, is Aug, Sep and the first days of Oct

3) First I groped then by 'family of vehicles' BMPs (Blue) are close to half of the total, they seem to be on a very slow decline, The simple MT-LBs family (Orange) has been slowly, as have the BTRs (Gray) The Air Mobile Vehicles (yellow) typically used by the VDV are interesting, large numbers were lost in the opening weeks, then declined, the bump in Sep-Nov 22, was mostly the discovery of old losses when Ukrian recaptured a lot of territory. Their numbers looked like they were attenuating towards zero, but in the last 2 months, they have ticked up a bit. There is also a handful of other types, groped as 'Others' (light Blue) at the very top. For simplicity, I have left the 128 'unknown IFV/APC' off this graph, but they are becoming slightly more common.

4) Now looking at The BMP family in more detail, we see this, the only BMP in production is the BMP-3 (blue) its share has increased from about 15% a year ago to about 20% now. Only small numbers of BMP-1s were lost at the very start of the war, probably because not many were used, but that rapidly changed as Russia brought more to the front line, some transferred from the border force and riot police, as well as storage, but it peeked about July 23, and has declined notably since. However Aug and Sep 24, seem flat, so It's not clear if that decline has now stopped, or is just random. the BMP-2 has remained the most numbers type throughout, but there are now very few BMP-2s left in storage, so logically this will be the first to go into terminal decline. Possibly that's the point we are at now, but it's too early to say.

5) Next up are the wheeled BTRs, BTR means APC in English, however, the most common BTR is the BTR-82 (yellow), which has a bigger gun, silly less room for infantry, which either makes it an IFV or perhaps more accurately a Crossover APC-IFV. It's still in production some were made from old BTR-80s but it's not clear to me if that's still happening. The BTR 80s (orange) have been on a gradual decline since Oct 22, it is however sporadic, and they don't seem to be disappearing. The BTR-70 (and 60)(blue) are very old APCs, not thought to have been used when the war started, the few lost in the early war might have been LPR DPR militia rather than the regular Russian army, however, there are over 1,000 in storage, of which about 200 have recently been taken out of storage and perhaps the miner increase in the last 4 months is indication that they are now starting to get to the front line. Only 1 of the very very old BTR-60s has been lost so I have added it to the BTR-70s for simplicity.

6) Now on to the Air-mobile IFV/APCs, largely used by the Russian VDV, as a reminder these are the thin yellow strip in the original family graph.

7) Russia uses 4 Air-mobile Vehacales, all tracked and lightweight compared to other IFV/APC that in simple terms are:

BMD-2 Old IFV (orange)
BTR-D Old APC (yellow)
BMD-4 New IFV (blue)
BTR-MDM New APC (green)

The BMD-4 is still in production, and depending on reports the BTR-MDM might also be (but at low numbers)

Since the opening days, these types have not recovered losing over 200 in the first 3 months of fighting, almost as many as the next 28 months combined.

The BMD-2 does appear to be on the ascendancy in the last year going from 30% to 80%. it's not clear why, considering it's not in production and not many are in storage. considering that we are only talking small numbers, it might just be random, and/or rotation of units. There were however several hundred BMD-1s in storage so perhaps Russia has been upgrading them to BMD-2s, The BMD-2 is based on the BMD-1 so this might be possible but I don't know.

The decline of BMD-4s (and BTR-MDMs) showing up suggests to me that production of these types is very low, (possibly the plant is now prioritizing updating BMD1s to 2s?) but it could be that they are going to a reformed VDV unit, that's not in the fighting, or could just be random as the sample set is too small to tell.

8) Here is the data table I created based on the loss data by @WarSpotting and when I have referred to storage numbers it's based on satellite counts of IFV/APCs led by
@Jonpy99
Thank you both for making your data available, and I recommend following both. I do intend to create more of these graphs of APC/IFVs looking in more detail at a few things, the subvarants of many types. However, I recently lost all my previous tables, so I am having to recreate from a much earlier version, sorry for the delays in publishing that this is creating.

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