Russia and Ukraine flashpoint

[Bofferbrauer2]

shavenferret said:

Will we start seeing 2000 Russian casualties every day in the coming year?

What's interesting is that their Tank losses are way down. I speculate that they're slowly running out of good tanks and an increasing amount of divisions are now only equipped with BMP at best.

According to the Oryx blog, Russia has lost almost as many tanks as they do IFV, and almost twice as much as their AFV and APC taken together. However, those latter categories are much easier and faster to produce than any tanks, especially when the "produced" numbers are mostly just refurbished and upgraded old tanks.

The question is if Russia is going to buy some old T-62 from North Korea to remedy this somewhat. In fact, it could be that Russia didn't "find" the T54/55 (as they mentioned years before the invasion that they all got scrapped) and some of their T-62 in Russia, but bought them cheaply off North Korea, since the latter still had around 1000 to up to 1600 of those T54/55 and 800 T-62 (not counting the locally-produced Chonma-Ho, which got several upgrades over the years, but some of those are probably still baseline T-62) standing around. Since NK is constantly producing new tanks (2020 estimates set their half-decent tank forces, as in later Chonma-Ho models as well as the Pokpung-Ho, which incorporates some tech from the T-72 and T-90, at around 1500 tanks in total) and the T54/55 can't pierce shit anymore with their main gun, getting rid of those old things to make space for new ones, especially with some fresh tech from Russia added, makes perfect sense for them. This is especially true as they are readying a brand-new tank called the Cheonma-2, which seems to be more comparable to a modern western MBT rather than their other tanks which seem to be often 2-3 decades behind in tech.