Thread by @PhillipsPOBrien

A thread on claimed Russian losses, and why the Ukrainian official claims might be far more accurate than people think.

Its important to be skeptical of any government claiming losses inflicted on an enemy, historically such figures can be grossly inflated. One extreme example was the Japanese government in World War II, which claimed to basically wipe out the US Pacific fleet in every battle.

Only for the pesky Pacific Fleet to keep being amazingly rebuilt in a few months and appearing closer to Japan each time. As such, Ive never used official Ukrainian claims on Russian losses during this war. Here is the most recent claims.

https://twitter.com/MFA_Ukraine/status/1511291421780754435?s=20&t=Vz44yUxrxA3HEgcaxu9jMA

These claims might seem very high--though for the first time we actually have a tool for comparison. Open source intelligence based on photographic evidence. We can thus have a baseline comparison between minimum Russian losses and Ukrainian claims.

https://twitter.com/MFA_Ukraine/status/1511291421780754435?s=20&t=Vz44yUxrxA3HEgcaxu9jMA

For tanks, which the open source intelligence has excellent evidence about, the difference between Ukrainian claims (676) and proven losses (425) is actually not that large considering that the OSINT figure is a base line.

There would be a large number of Russian losses not recorded--such as those not photographed (probably the large majority which were lost in territory under Russian ain the south and east), those which have been recovered by the Russians and those which have not yet been entered.

For those behind Russian lines, we can now assume those to be a very large number. Since the Russians pulled back from Kyiv, the database has been updated with approximately 50 new entries. Yet the Kyiv front only contained approx 30% of Russian forces.

If Russian forces in the south and east have suffered similar loss rates during the war, we can say that there would be something close to 115-120 undocumented destroyed Russian tanks behind Russian lines.

As for hit Russian tanks that they would be trying to recover, those damaged, etc, I have generally been using a rate of 25% of documented losses to put this figure in perspective. This is actually a very low rate (in WW2 there would be a much higher rate of damaged to destroyed

So I am being relatively cautious in estimating that there is another 25% of Russian tanks that would have been hit compared to those documented as destroyed. As of yesterday, that would have been an additional 111.

So if we add up documented losses (425) with a reasonable expection of undocumented losses behind Russian lines (min 115) with damaged tanks that the Russians would be trying to salvage (111), you end up with 651 lost tanks.

That is only a little below the Ukrainian total of 676. So the Ukrainian claim, in historical terms, seems pretty reasonable and they might very well have hit 676 Russian tanks during the war so far.

Here is a link to the Oryx open source list, which has been sitting at 425 since yesterday, so still needs an update. oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack…

And here is a map of the territory (red and pink) in which there would be many undocumented Russian losses.

Been asked what percentage of overall Russian tanks that would be. Its not straightforward. If all Russian BTGs had a full compliment going into the invasion, that would be 1200. However other units would have had armor components as well, and Im not expert enough to say.

I think you could estimate around 1500 as a high base rate (that would be alot for an army of 200,000. However, its also unlikely that all the BTGs had a full compliment as well, there were stories of them coming in below strength. so 1500 could be rather high.

Here is the thread on tank losses started a little while ago that got me thinking about this. Has something about how many losses were being recorded once the area to the north of Kyiv was recovered.

https://twitter.com/PhillipsPOBrien/status/1511029466239221766?s=20&t=I2zLDvO1WvArS8Fxj97vow