Open Source Adventures: Episode 35: Better Data Sources for Russian Losses App

The visualization so far depends on three things:

• how many tanks Russia had
• what were the losses so far
• what will be the losses in the future

There's no perfect answer to the questions about past and future losses, but we should know Russian starting situation at least.

At least we should have some answer for the first question, as IISS publishes their annual book with the best information we have. Following numbers are from IISS Military Balance 2022.

Tanks

Russian army had 2927 tanks in active service and 10200 in storage.

Russian marines had additional 330 tanks.

Russian airborne forces had additional 160 tanks.

Armored Vehicles

What's a "MBT" is the only thing everyone can agree on, everything else has more vague categorization.

According to Military Balance 2022, Russian army had the following categories of armored vehicles:

• 1700 RECCE (1000 in storage)
• 5180 IFV (8500 in storage)
• 6050 APC (6000 in storage)

Russian marines had additional 1260 IFVs, and 400 APCs.

Russian airborne forces had additional 130 IFVs, 822 APC, and 1351 ABCV.

Rosgvardia had additional 1650 IFV/APC.

Artillery

We have categorization issues here as well. Let's just add towed, self-propelled, and MRL artillery together. By that count Russian army had 4894 artillery pieces.

Russian marines had additional 405 artillery.

Russian airborne forces had additional 600 artillery.

Rosgvardia had additional 20 artillery.

Totals

• Tanks: 3417 in service, 10200 in storage
• Armored vehicles: 18543 in service, 15500 in storage
• Artillery: 5919 in service

These numbers are higher than numbers commonly quoted by the media, as the commonly quoted figures are army only, and these also include marines and airborne units, which are also involved in the war.

Losses so far

From latest Ukrainian data. For artillery I'm adding artillery and MRL columns.

• 722 tanks (21% of active service)
• 1911 armored vehicles (10% of active service)
• 450 artillery pieces (8% of active service)

Story so far

I updated the app with more recent data, and using IISS tanks estimate as the baseline. Due to much higher number of tanks in the recent estimate and less intense recent fighting, that moves the default estimate from 10 October 2022 to 27 November 2022.

All the code is on GitHub.

I deployed this on GitHub Pages, you can see it here.

Coming next

In the next episode, I'll try to extend the app to include armored vehicles and artillery losses.