1) For the first time in two and a half years, Russia has not lost (Visually Confirmed) a single T-90 Tank for a whole month. (and only the second month of the war, after July 2022)
I think they are now very low on their best Main Battle Tank, in working condition. 🧵
2) Overall, Russia is only visually confirmed to have lost 151 T-90s, but a portion of the 333 'Unknown Tanks' will also be T-90s, and others will have been lost and not photographed. At any point in time, there will be some damaged tanks that will need repairs.
3) Russia claimed to have made 60 T-90Ms in 2021; this number might be accurate, but I suspect it includes many upgrades from T-90As.
They also claim to have increased production to 18 a month. To achieve anything close to this, All (or almost all) will have been upgraded.
4) But the thing about 'Upgrades' is you eventually run out of old tanks to upgrade. I suspect Russia effectively Ran out of T-90As to upgrade at least 6 months ago.
New build T-90M will be much more complicated/slower, especially with both international sanctions and with lots of other parts of the Russian defence industry competing for resources.
5) T-90s have always been small as a share of total tank losses, but they have been falling since April 24.
Russia may be keeping a T-90 M-equipped elite unit in reserve, ready to respond to any mutiny in the rest of the army. If this is the case, it's probably a small unit.
6) To finish, can I thank @warspotting for their work to Visually Confirm all Russian losses and make their data available on their website, warspotting.net
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1) With so much news coming from the war, this almost feels redundant, but here is my update🧵on Russia Tank losses, again T-80s losses out numbered T-72s, but not by as much as the last few months, T-90 losses are stedy, but T-62 Losses are down.
2) The first graph does not include 'Unknown Tank' which have been increasing and were over 25% in May (Black in this graph) this adds an extra layer of uncertainty on this, but I will persevere anyway.
3) T-90 losses, Q2 has so far only been T-90Ms. I don't know how many T-90As are left, but I suspect its very few now, the rest having been destroyed or upgraded to T-90M, but possibly some that have been forgotten.
1) The very old Russian BRM-1(K) are still rare, but becoming more common amongst Russian Losses.
So what does this mean? 🧵
2) They are still less than 2% of all Russian IFV/APC losses, but they are now over 20% of BMP-1 Based vehicles losses.
Note: I have left of the first couple of months of the war, as these months had a lot of LNR/DNR losses and were untypical.
3) So what is the BRD-1(K)? it is a soviet design reconsases vheale, based on the BMP-1. Built between 1973 and 1988, it had extra surveillance and communication equipment compared to the BMP-1 but less ammunition for its main gun, and didn't carry infantry.
1) Russian IFV/APC types that are still IN PRODUCTION are becoming rarer. After a peek in November 2024, they have dropped below 20% for some reason. a short 🧵
2) If we look at losses for the first week of April, they are down to just 2.2% of the total IFV/APC losses. I've added this week to the graph and posted here, but posting it in the second tweet in🧵so I'm not being too sensational.
3) There are 3 types known to be in production, the BMP-3,BMD-4 and BTR-82, plotting these losses against each other looks like this, the BMP-3 are a shrinking proportion of a shrinking pie.
1) Ukrainian keeps destroying Russian Tanks, so I'm going to keep on making graphs and 🧵 of destroyed Russian tanks.
Russian T-80s recorded the highest proportion ever 54%, and T-72 recorded the smallest ever 22%.
2) The T-80s are the most significant type, so I will start with them. T-80U losses have been minimal for two years now, but there seems to be a relatively consistent rate of change to the Orb 2022 variants. If this continues, then all the old ones will be gone around Jul/Aug.
3) T-90 losses remain bout 7% of the total. So fr this quarter they have all been the T-90M variant.
I think 'most', by which I mean almost all of the 'New T-90Ms', have been upgraded T-90a, not new builds, for the last two years, and now they're out of T-90a.
1) The makeup of Russian lost IFVs has shown a strange pattern recently. I don't know why, but the types still in production made up 25-30% of losses for most of the war, then that rose rapidly to about 40% in November, nd have now dropped to just 20%🧵
2) By types still in production, I mean the IFV BMP-3, the air mobile IFV BMP-3 and the wheeled IFV/PC crossover BTR-82.
I have not included the BTR-MDM, as there are conflicting counts regarding whether it's in production, but with only 42 losses total it won't change the graph.
3) Between November and February, the number of tracked vs. wheeled losses has increased each year, which could explain some of the change. However, it's more pronounced this year. This shows up in the first graph of new-build vs. old, which did not last a few years.
1) Russian Visuly confirmed IFV/APC losses by type over the war.
It looks like 8-wheel BTR losses are a much smaller proportion of the total than usual, Reversing the trend of the last 10 months.
But this is almost certainly the mud season, 'Rasputitsa' and not a new trend.
2) I left December off the graphs and predicted a little differently. This showed what I think is the trend.
The top three IFV/APCs are still being made: BMP-3 (Dark Blue), BTR-82 (Green), and BMD-4M (Light Blue). However, the BTR-82 is increasing the most rapidly, suggesting it is being built in the largest numbers.
Meanwhile, the old BMP-1 and 2s (grey) are declining fastest, and MT-LBs are also declining more gradually, suggesting that supplies from the storage bases have decreased.
3) It might be that BMP-2s are now declining faster than BMP-1s, which makes sense because Russia would logically take the BMP-2s first, but this has only been 2 months, so it's too early to call a trend.