Moscow’s willingness to take territory in the face of high casualty figures, coupled with a boost in output of artillery shells, is in contrast with a lack of sustained Western supply of artillery ammunition to Kyiv. Those dynamics have created the conditions for the most recent shift in the land-campaign’s momentum as the third year of fighting in Russia’s full-scale invasion sets in.
The new phase comes after a challenging year for both sides in which they struggled to mount successful attacks. Offensive operations achieved limited territorial gains and incurred significant casualties. Russia and Ukraine have both found breaching operations difficult, hindered by well-fortified defensive positions and slowed by artillery fire, land mines and loitering munitions. The struggles have exposed training and leadership deficits which have limited the tactical effectiveness of offensive operations on both sides, while showing skill in orchestrating positional defences.
Heavy Russian casualties may mean Moscow will not mount a major offensive until after the pro forma, mid-March re-election of President Vladimir Putin. Over the spring and summer, Russia is likely to mount a series of major attacks designed to inflict Ukrainian casualties, push defenders westward and expand its control of occupied territories.
This defensive focus comes at a time when Ukraine has faced difficult choices absent the Western delivery of advanced weapons that Kyiv asked for to gain a decisive advantage. Those requests included enhanced electronic-warfare capabilities, more surveillance and attack uninhabited aerial vehicles (UAVs), better mine-breaching tools and F-16 combat aircraft (though training on those is now underway). Until such equipment and more artillery ammunition arrives, though, the dilemma for Ukraine’s army is choosing between a forward-defence posture to keep Russian forces from cities and towns at the cost of higher casualties, or pulling back to conserve troops.
With Ukraine resetting its ground forces in the aftermath of its largely unsuccessful counter-offensive of 2023 and recent Russian advances, the country is doubling down onits deep battle strategy, with UAV attacks as far afield as Moscow, St Petersburg and the Nizhny Novgorod region in central Russia, some 1,000 kilometres from Ukraine.
Unless the West restores aid to Kyiv to previously provided levels, including sufficient artillery for Ukraine to achieve the superiority it enjoyed at the height of last year’s counter-offensive, Russia will retain the battlefield initiative. That could spell, in the worst-case scenario, a series of tactical defeats for Ukraine that could lead to a collapse of parts of its front line.
For now, US efforts under President Joe Biden to provide Ukraine with another meaningful military-aid package remain blocked by House Republicans. Europe, meanwhile, has not demonstrated the industrial capacity or political will to quickly address Ukraine’s urgent needs, although several military-assistance efforts are in the works. While the United Kingdom has pledged to supply ‘thousands’ of new, long-range attack UAVs, when they may arrive remains uncertain.
As the conflict evolves throughout 2024, a key element could well be a contest between Russian attritional tactics and efforts by Ukraine to gain an asymmetric advantage through advanced Western technology, providing this arrives in sufficient time and volume. If that happens, the war momentum could swing again, benefitting Kyiv. But for now, the land war looks bloody and favours Moscow.
Yohann Michel IISS
Russia’s losses over the past 24 months raise a key question: how long can Moscow sustain these equipment-attrition rates?
Russia’s offensive on Avdiivka, which began in autumn 2023, is only one example where the assaulting force has suffered heavy equipment and personnel attrition. Still, Russian troops have been able to make inroads there, aided by an advantage in artillery.
The Military Balance 2024 reflects figures up to November, though the IISS has continued to update its data. The numbers for Ukrainian- and Russian-equipment changes reflect a range of inputs, including visually confirmed losses drawn from a variety of sources, the preponderance of which are based on images from the battlefield, especially those collected by uninhabited aerial vehicles. These inputs generally reflect the impact of tactical skirmishes and understate the scale of losses; they tend not to capture the full scale of long-range engagements and associated destruction of equipment, particularly of weapon systems mostly operating further behind enemy lines than tanks and infantry-fighting vehicles, such as artillery and air defences. quickly withdrew from an area, leaving behind destroyed equipment that would otherwise not have been visible. The IISS cross-referenced indicated losses from imagery with other information sources, including Pentagon data leaked in 2023, open-source trackers, including Oryx, interviews and other reports.
Not all the images of equipment hit in combat equate to a system being destroyed, of course. Our calculation also reflects an estimate of what damaged and abandoned equipment was restored to service and what portion was taken off the battlefield for good. In other instances, inventory adjustments reflect equipment captured. For instance, Ukraine now operates a meaningful number of the armoured vehicles it captured from Russian forces.
Overall, we estimate that two years after the full-scale invasion, the number of MBTs in service in the Ukrainian armed forces remains near pre-war levels, while the number of APCs and IFVs has increased thanks to Western support. However, Ukrainian efforts to field additional combat elements have outpaced equipment supply, leaving some units lacking equipment to be even close to full strength.
Commercial overhead imagery does shed light, though, on Russian equipment in storage that is potentially available for activation or refurbishment to compensate for further battlefield losses. Russia has 10 Central Tank Reserve Bases, at least 37 mixed equipment- and armaments-storage bases, and at least 12 artillery-storage bases. An in-depth assessment by the IISS last year showed equipment replenishments were roughly keeping pace with battlefield attrition.
It is our assessment, therefore, that Russia will be able to sustain its assault on Ukraine at current attrition rates for another 2–3 years, and maybe even longer.