2 July 2024

Satellite Data Suggests Russia May Be Running Out of Tanks

Isabel van Brugen

Russia has sustained high losses of tanks since President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine more than two years ago, and may have just a few thousand of the armored fighting vehicles left, artificial intelligence (AI) analysis of satellite imagery suggests.

German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) trained an AI model to examine satellite imagery of 87 Russian military sites—including 16 bases where tanks, artillery vehicles and armored personnel carriers are stored.

The AI model counted the number of tanks at these key sites prior to the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, up until the present day, to determine the scale of the country's tank losses in the war.

One of these bases, the 111th Central Tank Reserve Base of the Army in southeastern Russia, which housed 857 tanks in April 2021, is now nearly empty, satellite imagery suggests. Just months into the war, in October 2022, Russia had lost nearly half of these tanks, the newspaper found. Analysis of other military sites painted a similar picture, SZ said.

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