Russia has lost 850,000 troops and over 10,000 tanks, according to Ukraine’s military, providing a staggering estimate of the toll nearly three years of grinding war has taken on the Russian military.
February 24 will mark three years since Russian tanks rolled into different parts of Ukraine and Moscow’s full-scale invasion got underway.
The war has become Europe’s largest since World War II, and while the conflict has debuted brand-new tactics and next-generation weapons, Kyiv and Moscow have leaned heavily on armored vehicles and tanks on the battlefield.
Both have suffered losses, but Russia is particularly known for chewing through high numbers of tanks and other equipment, as well as racking up eyewatering numbers of casualties, to take territory from Ukraine.
Ukraine’s military said on Monday that Russia had lost more than 10,001 tanks in Europe’s largest land conflict since World War II, including 9 in the previous 24 hours.
It also claimed that Russian casualties at the front reached 850,490, with at least 1170 Putin’s troops eliminated over the past day.
It is very difficult to independently verify tank and personnel losses along the hundreds of miles of frontlines.
Russia has not updated its tally of 6,000 killed soldiers since September 2022. General Oleksandr Syrskyi, in charge of Ukraine’s military, said in January 2025 that Russia had suffered over 434,000 casualties last year, marking a significant spike from Ukraine’s tally of Russian casualties in 2023.
Comparing Ukraine’s casualty count to that of Russia last week, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky said the interview that approximately 350,000 Russian soldiers have been killed, with between 600,000 to 700,000 instances of Russian soldiers sustaining wounds on the battlefield.
Ukraine’s tallies of personnel and armor losses come in significantly higher than several Western intelligence estimates and open-source tallies, although governments supporting Kyiv do typically reference counts put forward by Ukraine’s military.
One British military adviser cited on February 5 figures putting Russian main battle tank losses at “over 3,700,” plus more than 8,000 armored vehicles. The British Defense Ministry had said in mid-December that main battle tank losses for Russia stood at roughly 3,600.
In February 2024, the British think tank, the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) said Russia had lost a total of more than 3,000 tanks in two years of war, including 1,120 in 2023.
Dutch investigative outlet Oryx, which catalogues visually-verified losses, said that Moscow had lost at least 3,734 tanks in just shy of three years. Of this number, 2,666 tanks were destroyed, with 157 damaged and 534 captured, according to the outlet.
Experts previously told Newsweek that in its initial operations, Russia’s tank crews were beset by organization and planning failures and weighed down by low morale, as well as ineffective command chains.
The most-experienced tank crews were committed to the fight in the very few weeks of the full-scale war, leaving behind new recruits with few trainers to instruct them, observers said.
The British Defense Ministry said in late 2024 that Russian tank losses had led to a “reliance on outdated and poorly maintained Soviet-era equipment,” which was being “hauled out of storage, upgraded where possible and sent to the frontline.”
Reports from Ukraine have long suggested Moscow pulled deep from its decades-old stocks to replace its losses, and turned to museums for additional tanks and armored vehicles.
The Kremlin has packed antiquated vehicles with explosives to launch them toward Ukrainian forces, and published a readout of a meeting between Russian leader Vladimir Putin and the head of Russia’s largest film studio, in which the director-general admitted the studio had sent nearly 30 T-55 tanks, 8 Soviet-era PT-76 tanks, plus a handful of infantry fighting vehicles and trucks to the military to prop up the war effort.
Estimates from the U.K. government in early 2024 suggested Russia was able to pump out around 100 new tanks each year.
Shortly after, Putin said domestic tank production had grown fivefold in two years, although Western experts cast doubt over whether the tanks rolling off these production lines are up to scratch.
Russian President Vladimir Putin in February 2024, in remarks reported by state media: “Russian defense industry plants are doing a tremendous amount of work now.”
Marina Miron, a postdoctoral researcher with the War Studies department at King’s College London, told Newsweek: The Ukrainian figures are reported to “keep the morale up. Both Moscow and Kyiv underreport their own losses and overstate the enemy’s figures, its common practice.”
She added that there will be some confusion over which tanks Ukraine will deem a loss, versus those which Russia will be able to recover and redeploy. “It’s very imprecise.”
Tank losses will continue to mount on both sides until an elusive ceasefire agreement is inked, although this is not likely to be reached in the coming weeks despite new efforts from U.S. President Donald Trump.
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