Russia is estimated to have lost almost half of its best tanks during its invasion of Ukraine, with Vladimir Putin’s troops stepping up attacks in the country’s eastern regions including Donetsk and Luhansk.
The assessment, from military think tank the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), suggests that Moscow's pre-invasion fleet of modern T-72B3 and T-72B3M main battle tanks has been hit particularly hard, with a loss rate of up to 50 per cent. The director general of the IISS, John Chipman, said that Moscow has been forced “to rely on its older stored weapons” thanks to production of the newer models being “slow”. That means falling back on its Soviet-era tanks.
