1/ Analyzing the remaining storage bases uncounted until now. A thread🧵
2/ So, as I explained recently in another thread where I posted their coordinates, thanks to a recent article from @tochnyi I realized we had been missing some minor storage bases until now.
4/ In any case, after a lot of work, and not with a degree of uncertainty regarding whether I accurately pinpointed the location of said storage bases or not, I bring you the numbers!
5/ MLRS:
6/ Artillery:
7/ APCs:
8/ Tanks and IFVs:
9/ I'll need some time to properly ID tanks, SPGs and towed artillery, as that's @HighMarsed and others specialty. However, when added to the equipment already tallied in our spreadsheet, you can see that this increases even more Russian losses. docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d…
10/ I'm not going to go over every base here, it's too much. Suffice to look at some and also note that most of them lack recent footage.
11/ So, that said, let's take a look at the 262nd. By the most recent footage in May 2023 it was almost empty.
12/ Same with the 246th:
13/ @waffentraeger already did an awesome thread analyzing the 943rd at Novoozerne in detail, so better to stick to his thread:
14/ And tbe 904th actually looks more like a staging ground, as it's very close to Ukraine, tho it also hosts less equipment than before the war started, and mostly trucks:
15/ Another few things I want to note here. First, I keep finding that Russians are taking away the scrap from the fields. Like here, at the tank scrapyard of the 7004th in Ussuriysk.
16/ Which brings me back to one of my earliest threads.
17/ Second, sometimes the limit between what's storage and what's not is very hard to tell. Like this training area right nect to the 7049th in Luga. All thos MT-LBs and SPGs, should they be counted or not? I didn't, but for what's worth, looking at Sentinel-2 they're long gone.
18/ Third, and related to the previous post, surely we're also missing some equipment by sticking purely to storage bases. Take a look at this staging area near Yelnya. It's an active base, but right before the start of the war a lot was stored there. But it's not storage.
19/ One last thing to finish this thread. It was also needed to update the corresponding storage bases' designation, so, among other things:
237th -> 330th
240th -> 378th
247th -> 338th
7004th -> 597th
7024th -> 904th
7022nd -> 425th
7033th -> 781st
20/ 216th -> 374th
The 2456th and 103rd are apparently the same, while the 769th Central Tank Reserve is the main body of the base and the 227th is around, which in turn the 227th becomes the 835th and 342nd.
And there's even more changes, but this is already confusing enough.
21/ So, I'll just update the sheet, and hopefully next weekend there'll be another thread or even two on smaller topics. I still want to do the BTRZ update before 2024 ends, but we'll see about it.
22/ Actually, already started working on the towed AA guns count. What a throwback...
Since some people are wondering how many of the "poor" and "worse" tanks can ever be brought back to service, let me explain it once more: ALL OF THEM. It's just a matter of money and time, and how willing the Kremlin is to waste its assets.
Take for example the 2456th tank storage base. The main facility is the one already known, but to the right there's the old scrapyard. Right when the war started they were scrapping T-62s and 64s there, but they stopped for obvious reasons:
We included this tanks in our count, as explained by @CovertCabal in his video about the 2456th, because the ones remaning weren't yet scrapped, tho they're in a terrible state.
Thanks to the kind benefactor we observe that in 3-4 months things have changed a lot for the Russian tank reserve:
- Overall tanks have dropped from 3,106 to 2,478.
- More specifically, T-72As, which previously stand almost the same as prewar, have dropped from 900 to just 461.
Even at bases which previously hadn't seen abrely any tank drawdown like the 2544th, which also has T-62s, T-72As are being pulled out like crazy.
No surprise, considering other recent developments linked to this one, which are what allowed us to suspect in the first place T-72As were fastly being removed from storage bases:
Only question now is how many T-90As they had in the first place, how many T-90Ms are actually made from scratch and how long the tank stockpiles will last, considering they already going for T-72As.
To clarify: this doesn't mean Russia doesn't produce T-90Ms from scratch. In fact T-90A refurbs are probably but a tiny share of the total producion. Among other things, because barely 200 T-90As were produced.
1/ Sort 🧵about the 6018th: while there's still no new decent footage of this major storage base, a closer look at a recent update on Copernicus (Sentinel-2) appears to show a lot of naked ground on the spot where there used to be a lot of the remaining (poorly conserved) armor.
2/ After mostly emptying out the 6018th earlier in the war, in recent times they've come back to pick up the remains.
3/ I previously speculated that these base probably has seen, at the vary least, most or all of their remaining rusty T-80s and better preserved BMP-1/2/3s taken in recent months. We'll just have to wait until better proof of it.
It would appear whatever stock of T-72Bs held UVZ at their own facilities, is now exhausted, as the Russians have restarted to take T-72Bs stored at the 1311th base to be refurbished at that factory. The stock probably won't last long, I estimate they pull ~20 per month.
Also, unless I'm seriously mistaken with the count/IDs, there are no more T-80BVs at the 1311th. By now it's likely there are no stored T-80s left at all (possibly the ones remaining at the 22nd are all T-80UDs).
Would need a recent image of the 6018th to prove it, but unfortunately that base gets no coverage at all as of lately. This would also point to Omsktransmash being able to quickly work through its backlog of T-80s, similar to what I already analyzed in previous BTRZ threads.