Destroy 4,500 Vehicles A Year For Two Years

With its economy on a war footing and mothballed factories coming back online, Russia now is generating around 4,500 armored vehicles a year for its 470,000-person invasion force in Ukraine.

That’s one finding of a new study from the Royal United Services Institute in London.

4,500 vehicles a year isn’t quite enough vehicles to make good the 10,000 or so tanks, fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers that, according to the analysts at Oryx, Russia has lost in the first two years of its wider war on Ukraine.

But it’s close. And it’s for that reason the Kremlin “believes that it can sustain the current rate of attrition through 2025,” RUSI analysts Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds wrote.

The catch is that, according to Watling and Reynolds, 80 percent of those 4,500 vehicles the Russians generate every year aren’t new vehicles. They’re “refurbished and modernized from Russian war stocks.”

And those stocks, once bursting with leftover Cold War-vintage vehicles, are finite. “The number of systems held in storage means that while Russia can maintain a consistent output through 2024, it will begin to find that vehicles require deeper refurbishment through 2025,” the RUSI analysts wrote.

“By 2026 it will have exhausted most of the available stocks,” they continued.

RUSI’s conclusions are consistent with the conclusions of a recent report from the Estonian defense ministry. In Russia, “production of new equipment is largely giving way to refurbishing equipment from the long-term storage,” the ministry found.

Old war stocks could hold up “for several more years,” the Estonians concluded. Open-source analysts, who scour satellite imagery to count active, destroyed and stored armored vehicles, posit trends that point to Russia’s vehicle reserves running out in 2025 or 2026.

Russia can shift more resources into producing new vehicles, of course. But where refurbishing a vehicles mostly requires a little metalwork, an engine overhaul, replacement of radios and—if the crews are lucky—a few modest upgrades to the optics and armor, from-scratch production is much more labor- and resource intensive.

For the Russians, “significantly improving production quality under international sanctions is likely unrealistic even in the medium term,” the Estonian defense ministry explained. Sanctions “have limited the Russian [military-industrial complex]’s access to high-quality components, especially machine tools, production lines and factory equipment.”

Yes, Russian can import more machinery from China, but Chinese tools might not be as good—or even as available—as the best German tools. “In the short term, the MIC is likely incapable of significantly expanding the production of new armored vehicles.”

“This will necessarily mean a significant decrease in vehicles delivered to the military,” Watling and Reynolds wrote. But not until the old war reserves run out, potentially in a couple of years.

If Russia intends to fight the way it’s been fighting, with large mechanized forces in the lead, there is—barring major industrial surprises—a ticking clock that’s counting down to the day when the Kremlin spends its existing combat power … and can’t replace it.

Ukraine could aim to outlast Russia. But Ukrainian industry is far more constrained than Russian industry is, so Ukraine depends more on its allies than Russia does.

All that is to say, Ukraine can win a grinding war of attrition, but only with help. “If Ukraine’s partners continue to provide sufficient ammunition and training support to the [armed forces of Ukraine] to enable the blunting of Russian attacks in 2024, then Russia is unlikely to achieve significant gains in 2025,” the RUSI analysts wrote.

And “if Russia lacks the prospect of gains in 2025, given its inability to improve force quality for offensive operations, then it follows that it will struggle to force Kyiv to capitulate by 2026,” the analysts added.

“Beyond 2026, attrition of systems will begin to materially degrade Russian combat power, while Russian industry could be disrupted sufficiently by that point, making Russia’s prospects decline over time.”

The problem for Ukraine, of course, is that its biggest ally—the United States—hasn’t provided any fresh aid in nearly two months. Russia-aligned Republicans in the U.S. Congress have refused to vote on additional aid, and there’s no sign they might relent.

So Ukrainian troops must hold out, and attrit Russian forces, for another two years with only their poorer European allies to sustain them.