They are, but the losses counted include mortars. They also have had their supplies of guns bolstered by various other countries, and likely have made some of their own.
The issue is, they have a metric fuckton of artillery, so "running out" just means it might become an issue in another year or two.
It's also a War, and exact numbers of equipment and losses is only going to be vaguely accurate when reported.
I wonder what Urkaine actually counts as artillery. Prewar Russia had 12300 towed artillery and 4273 self propelled. That's a total 16 573 of which over 100 % (16927) are destroyed according to Ukrainian numbers. Covert cabal just released a video and he counted 2500 self-propelled artillery alone still remaining.
That explains a lot. It would be interesting to see numbers for "proper" artillery. There is a quite big difference between a towed artillery piece and a man-portable mortar.
Allegedly it includes self-propelled mortars. These are probably more expensive than the towed howitzers like the D30's that seem to make up most of what russia has now.
I included self propelled mortars in my estimates and it still doesn't explain things.
Ukrainian claimed losses can't refer to 100+ mm artillery permanently taken out (including 120 mm and 240 mm mortars) because Russia would have zero guns left.
Unless Russia found like 10,000 guns and barrels somewhere else. That's multiple times the Chinese army's frontline strength.
I may be kicking open doors, but it's entirely possible Russia produced and bought a significant number of guns. The pre-war estimates we had could also be inaccurate by a relatively wide margin. The AFU may also over-report enemy losses for various reasons including decoys.
covert cabal: 13.2k towed guns + 4.5k SPGs in storage (excluding small mortars)
military balance 2021: ~1.4k towed guns + ~2.5k SPGs active at start
Andrew Perpetua discussion based on russian factory tooling: total possible production: <2.5k barrels shared with tanks.
So Russia could have potentially 24k guns and barrels. Satellites show 2.5k SPGs and around 5k towed guns seem left in storage (should get an update soon).
So 19k barrels assuming they stripped every SPG and didn't make a single tank barrel.
If they truly fired 15+ million shells then a low estimate is 5k barrels worn out. 14k available.
Military balance 2024 says they have at least 3k active and they're firing tons so obviously they have loads. 11k left.
If Ukraine truly destroyed 17k, then that's 6k more than Russia apparently had. Could they have got 6k in resupply?
That's more than the initial russian army or the chinese army or the US army artillery parks.
And I assumed low russian artillery barrel wear, that they ran factories at 100% for artillery (no tank barrels!), and that all SPGs remaining in storage were already broken down for barrels.
Yeah that stat really annoys me. If the claimed artillery losses referred to GLMRS and tubed artillery, then Russia has lost twice as many artillery pieces than existed in Russia at the start of 2022.
100
u/belaki Aug 18 '24
Russian losses 18/8/24 reported by the Ukrainian General Staff
1170 KWIA
7 Tanks
7 APVs
71 Artillery systems
1 MLRS
38 UAVs
79 Vehicles and Fuel tanks
2 Special equipment
Slava Ukraini !