For Russia, the loss of thousands of tanks is an accepted cost of Putin's war in Ukraine

Days before the Russian in‐ vasion in February 2022, Ukraine's top military lead‐ ers had a sharp message to share.

"We are ready to meet the enemy, and not with flowers, but with Stingers, Javelins and NLAWs," the leaders of Ukraine's army and defence ministry warned, namechecking the very weapons they would use against their invaders.

Since the beginning of the war, Ukraine has used West‐ ern-supplied anti-tank weapons, their made-inUkraine equivalents and drones, to hit Russian tanks on the wrong side of the bor‐ der.

Russia has reportedly lost thousands of tanks to the in‐ vasion, but continues to send these hefty war machines to the front lines despite their apparent vulnerabilities.

Military analysts say the country is content to absorb these losses in pursuit of larger goals outlined by Presi‐ dent Vladimir Putin, favour‐ ing a quantity-over-quality approach.

"Rebuilding an empire within the borders of the former USSR is Putin's goal, and the loss of tanks is a per‐ fectly acceptable price for this," said Andrii Kharuk, a Ukrainian military historian, in an email.

The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), a London-based defence- and security-focused think-tank, believes Russia has lost at least 3,000 tanks during its Ukraine campaign. The opensource intelligence site Oryx puts the number at just un‐ der 2,850 as of the end of February.

Ukraine, meanwhile, claims to have destroyed twice this number.

Old tanks, new war Whatever the true count, Russia is looking to its Cold War inventory to source the replacement tanks it needs in Ukraine.

"Russia has a lot of tanks left over from overspending on defence during the Soviet era," said Nick Reynolds, a re‐ search fellow at the U.K.based Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), via email.

He says many of the tanks and armoured vehicles lost in Russia's invasion of Ukraine date from that era and were refurbished.

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Analysts say Russia's re‐ liance on these older ma‐ chines means the quality of the tanks being sent to Ukraine is decreasing with time.

Kharuk points to known examples of T-54 tanks - which began development in the 1940s - and also post-war T-55 tanks being pressed into service into Ukraine. T-62 models, which first entered production in the 1960s, are also present on the front lines of this war.

Peter Samsonov, an au‐

thor and independent tank expert, said Russia had sent T-62 tanks into Chechnya, in both wars there.

But the retooling of the older tank models, like the T55, surprised him.

"I did not even expect Russia to have any of these [tank] chassis still available," said Samsonov, whose Tank Archives blog provides de‐ tailed historical information on many Second World Warera tanks.

But he says Cold War-era thinking saw the Soviet Union hang onto large amounts of older weaponry such as tanks or guns, knowing that they could have have some use in the future.

Across the border

In the West, the kinds of losses Russia has seen would be fodder for potential criti‐ cism.

Robert Person, an expert on Russian politics at the United States Military Acade‐ my, said that in Russia, no such opposition can realisti‐ cally occur, given Putin's crackdown on dissent.

In this climate, Putin can drive forward with his war plans, even if thousands of tanks are compromised in the process - not to mention the lives of Russian troops being dispatched to the Ukrainian front lines.

"I don't think he loses any sleep over it," Person said in a telephone interview, noting his analysis was his own and not that of his employer.

RUSI's Reynolds sees a broader split in how soldiers' lives are viewed in Moscow versus in Western countries.

"Young Russian men are treated, at best, as having a duty to perform to Russia re‐ gardless of the personal con‐ sequences for them, or fre‐ quently, if they end up in the less attractive parts of the Russian Ground Forces, as simply a resource to be ex‐ pended," he said.

The rise of drone war‐ fare

Tanks have been wielded in wars across the world for more than a century. But their use in the Ukraine con‐ flict has shown how new tools - like drones - can po‐ tentially limit their useful‐ ness.

Kharuk, the Ukrainian his‐ torian, says Ukraine and Rus‐ sia are having to deal with what drone threats mean for tanks and what can be done in response.

"Will the tanks be able to adapt to the new threat? What will be the forms and methods of this adaptation?" he said.

"And won't this ultimately lead to a fundamental change in the very concept of a tank as a combat vehicle?"

But these are questions that have been asked for al‐ most as long as the weapons have existed, and so far, tanks have endured.