Russian forces have lost 127 tanks, 239 armored personnel vehicles (APVs) and 161 artillery systems in a week, Kyiv has said, as Russia steps up its attacks on Ukrainian defenses in eastern Ukraine.
Moscow’s forces lost eight tanks, 25 APVs and 33 artillery systems in the past day, Ukraine’s General Staff said on Sunday.
Newsweek cannot independently confirm Kyiv’s numbers, and has reached out to the Russian Defense Ministry for comment via email.
The war has proved costly for both sides as they burn through significant amounts of military equipment and sustain heavy casualties, but it is hard to gain an accurate picture of the scale of each side’s losses so far.
The reported losses have mounted as Ukraine’s counteroffensive grinds on, working to roll back Russian control in eastern and southern Ukraine since early June. The Ukrainian military had hoped to make sweeping gains before harsher, muddier fall and winter conditions set in, but with creeping advances along points of the front lines, significant victories have been slow to materialize for Kyiv’s fighters.
On Saturday, Russia’s Defense Ministry said Ukraine’s military had lost a total of 12,598 tanks and armored combat vehicles since Moscow’s troops crossed into Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk and southern Zaporizhzhia regions have been hotspots of fighting, with Ukraine claiming control of a smattering of villages along the front lines there in the past few months. Russian President Vladimir Putin illegally annexed four Ukrainian regions, including Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia, in September 2022, although his forces do not fully control any of them.
On Sunday, Kyiv’s General Staff said there had been 60 combat clashes over the past 24 hours, and that around 100 Ukrainian sites across the north, east and south of the country had come under artillery fire.
Russian forces “unsuccessfully” tried to break through Ukrainian defenses around the Kyiv-controlled eastern town of Avdiivka, the General Staff said in an operational update.
“Our Avdiivka is under mass attacks of Russian artillery and aviation,” Andriy Yermak, the head of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky‘s office, said earlier this week.
However, geolocated footage from the past few days indicate that Russian forces have advanced south of the town, as well as in positions north of Avdiivka, the U.S. think tank, the Institute for the Study of War, said on Saturday.
Elsewhere along the front lines, Russian forces had “no success” in launching five attacks to regain territory around the Zaporizhzhia town of Robotyne, Ukraine said.
In a statement on Saturday, Russia’s Defense Ministry said Russian forces repelled five attacks from Ukrainian mechanized brigades and its National Guard around Robotyne and the neighboring village of Verbove.
Fighting has also continued around the decimated eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, Kyiv’s military said.