Forbes: Russian Army Running Out Of Armoured Vehicles

The publication pointed out an important detail.

Having lost more than 15 thousand units of armoured vehicles on the battlefield for 35 months, the enemy army is replacing them with non-armoured vehicles. At the same time, Putin's army prefers to drive to the front line by a compact Lada model, Forbes reports.

The Ukrainian defenders first saw the enemy attacking with Zhiguli back in the autumn of 2024. Then they wrote off this case as an isolated one, but with each new day there were more and more attacks by Zhiguli.

OSINT analyst Moklasen wondered if attacking by Zhiguli has now become the norm for Putin's army.

Analyst Andrew Perpetua was also surprised by this change of equipment in the Russian Armed Forces army. Ladas and Nivas have become habitual vehicles in the ranks of the occupants when they are going to storm the AFU positions.

Every year the Russian Federation can produce about 90 tanks and 200 armoured vehicles, but the annual losses on the battlefield of these vehicles are catastrophic.

The Russian Federation has practically exhausted the stocks of military equipment that remained in warehouses since the Soviet times.

In December 2024, analyst Jompi estimated that there were only 2,358 armoured vehicles left in Russia's warehouses, but most of them are not repairable or upgradable. He noticed from satellite imagery that armoured vehicles in the Saigraevo depot had not been moved from their location since 2020, and in Kaliningrad since 2018.

‘A vehicle that doesn't move for that long is a dead vehicle,’ Jompi explained.

Analysts have long debated when the moment will come when the Kremlin will exhaust all its armoured vehicles. It appears to have already happened, as Putin's army is increasingly travelling to battle using compact Zhiguli models.

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