Russian tank losses in Ukraine — Syrskyi claims 1,159 'hit' since start of year

Ukraine's armed forces have "hit" 1,159 Russian tanks since the beginning of 2025, Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi said on May 17.

"Ukrainian soldiers continue to destroy the enemy and his equipment," he said in a post on Facebook.

"Since the beginning of this year alone, the Defense Forces have hit more than one thousand occupying tanks (1,159) and more than two and a half thousand war-armored vehicles (2,510)," he added.

Syrskyi did not specify if the military vehicles had been damaged or destroyed, but Ukraine's General Staff on May 18 reported Russia has also lost 10,832 tanks since the start of the full-scale invasion.

The Kyiv Independent could not verify the figures.

At the start of the full-scale invasion, Russia was estimated to have around 3,300 operational tanks, suggesting that all those that initially drove into Ukraine and then some, have been taken out over the course of two-and-a-half years.

It's impossible to know for certain exactly how many tanks Russia has lost during the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, so any figures need to be treated as estimates.

Further complicating matters is what exactly Ukraine's General Staff counts as a "tank," with Ukraine's official count being plausible, yet most likely misleading.

"The daily figures from Kyiv just say tanks, but because it has a separate section for armored personnel vehicles, so it's my interpretation that they group main battle tanks and infantry fighting vehicles," Sascha Bruchmann, visiting research fellow for defense and military analysis at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), told the Kyiv Independent last year.

Figures from the open-source investigative project Oryx put the number of tanks damaged or destroyed at 3,984.

How many tanks does Russia have left?

At the beginning of its full-scale invasion, Russia had around 3,330 operational tanks, according to the Military Balance 2021 database.

The database included all tank types then employed by Russia’s military, notably T-72s, T-80s, and T-90s, and their modifications.

Clearly, the most recent figures of Russian tanks destroyed would mean almost the entire tank fleet employed by the Kremlin at the start of the full-scale invasion had been destroyed.

But Russia had thousands of tanks in storage which it has been forced to use as the war dragged on far beyond what the Kremlin initially envisaged.

A September 2023 report by the Institut Action Résilience using OSINT data calculated Russia has an estimated maximum of 7,000 tanks in storage.

Can Russia replace lost tanks?

Russia does have the capacity to replace the tanks it had lost since February 2022, though there's a massive caveat.

While Russia can maintain the quantity of tanks at the front, the quality is diminishing all the time, experts say.

Retired military officer and defense expert Viktor Kevliuk told the Kyiv Independent last year, the "figure (of destroyed tanks) means that the enemy has lost almost all of the modern tanks that it had at the beginning of the invasion."

"The capabilities of Russian industry to produce modern tanks are extremely limited, with 100-200 tanks per year," he adds.

"The bulk of the tanks supplied to the front are restored machines from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s."