Every day, open-source analyst Andrew Perpetua sits down and spends hours scouring social media, satellite imagery and other sources for evidence of damaged, destroyed and abandoned vehicles—Russian and Ukrainian—all along the 600-mile front line of Russia’s two-year wider war on Ukraine.
On average every day, he identifies a couple of dozen freshly wrecked Russian vehicles and a handful of Ukrainian vehicles in the same condition. That’s consistent with Oryx’s overall tallies of Russian and Ukrainian equipment losses in the first 700 days of the wider war: respectively 14,000 and 5,000.
So what happened on or around March 1 to make March 2 one of Perpetua’s busiest days? Just slightly less busy than Feb. 3, when Perpetua counted losses that represented, for him, a one-day record: 103 damaged, destroyed and abandoned vehicles. Seventy were Russian; 33 were Ukrainian.
On March 2, Perpetua tallied 97 losses—84 of them Russian. Four times the daily average for the Russians and double the average for the Ukrainians.
It’s possible to make sense of the devastation. The February record came as the Russian army’s four-month campaign to capture Avdiivka, a former Ukrainian stronghold northwest of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, culminated in what would turn out to be a pyrrhic Russian victory.
The Russian 2nd and 41st Combined Arms Armies ended up losing 16,000 men killed, tens of thousands wounded plus around 700 vehicles seizing the ruins of Avdiivka from the ammunition-starved Ukrainian garrison, whose own personnel losses likely were in the four digits.
The Ukrainian 110th Brigade retreated from Avdiivka in mid-February. Rather than consolidating in the city’s rubble, the Russians kept attacking—chasing after the Ukrainians as they passed west through the first line of settlements, a few miles west of Avdiivka. The Russian army, bloodied though it was, quickly captured Stepove, Lastochkyne and Sjeverne.
It was in the next line of villages—Berdychi, Orlivka and Tonen'ke—that the Ukrainian 47th, 3rd and 57th Brigades switched from fighting-retreat to active-defense, turned and fought back with tanks, artillery, mortars and drones.
Bolstered by an uptick in ammunition deliveries from Ukraine’s European allies—though not from the United States, which hasn’t delivered aid since shortly after Russia-friendly Republicans in the U.S. Congress blocked funding back in October—the Ukrainian brigades halted the Russian advance.
The Institute for the Study of War in Washington, D.C. anticipated this development on Feb. 18. “Russian forces, which have suffered high personnel and equipment losses in seizing Avdiivka, will likely culminate when they come up against relatively fresher Ukrainian units manning prepared defensive positions,” ISW stated at the time.
The evidence of this culmination lay scattered across the fields, roads and treelines west of Avdiivka: hundreds of wrecked Russian vehicles and many fewer wrecked Ukrainian vehicles. Those 84 Russian losses Perpetua tallied on March 2 may point to the last big Russian push west of Avdiivka.
For now, at least.
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The Russians Usually Lose 20 Vehicles A Day. On March 1, They Lost 80. - Forbes
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