Russian Artillery
When will it be silenced?
Given the recent uptick of destroyed Russian artillery, how long will they be able to sustain quality & quantity of their army’s backbone? Will the claws of the Russian bear be broken anytime soon?
- Destruction rate: I lean on the statistics of Ragnar Gudmundson concerning lost artillery pieces (i.e. barrels). In total about 10,000 barrels have been silenced in the two years of war in Ukraine (100 per week or about 14 per day). Most interesting is the the uptick of lost barrels. In year one only 6 barrels were on average lost per day. The average for year two was about 21 barrels. That is a huge increase. Looking only at the last quarter the average increase to 25 barrels silenced per day. And in the last month only the value rises to 30 barrels lost, daily. If these recent numbers hold we will expect about 9,000 - 11,000 Russian barrels being silenced within a year from now. (You may add another 1,000 barrels lost as replacements - due to barrel fatigue).
- Replacement rates: Russias main source of replacement are found in the multiple, open air depots in about two handful places. Covert Cabal did a recent analysis of these depots with the help of satellite images. According to his counting Russia has to date picked out about half of all available artillery pieces since the start of the war. Of the initial 19,000 pieces more than 9,000 are gone. These missing barrels are close to the 10,000 barrels claimed to be lost since the start of the war.
- If we were to use the two year average of barbells lost the remaining 10,000 artillery pieces in the depots would last another two years. But, we have already noted that the current loss rate (9,000 - 11,000 per year) would lead to the depots being totally empty within a year, instead. Apart from that plain number crunching exercise done we may well expect that the specific needs from the active field units are far from 100% matched with the pieces still left in the depots (e.g. self going vs pulled pieces, varied barrel diameters & howitzer vs mortar). Also, one may expect that those pieces already picked from the depots were those that were in best condition. In conclusion, we may well expect a noticeable decline of Russias artillery performance in Ukraine within the next six months.
- The above reasoning is based on the assumption that Russia does not have any substantial capacity to produce new barrels. Here, I lean on an article of RO37 @ KOS. According to him, Russia has no longer any means of producing military high grade steel in volumes. This is due to a combination of Putins cut downs as well as the sanctions imposed by the West.
If the above reasoning is correct the Russian bear will soon be without its feared claws.
Ragnar Bjartur Gudmundsson 🇺🇦 (@ragnarbjartur.bsky.social) — Bluesky
Covert Cabal
https://youtu.be/FozvYM2Zhpw?si=2eUyTMKmL8yBNiA4
RO37
Ukraine Update: Russia doesn't have a backup plan when it runs out of artillery