Објаснети губитците на Русија во тенкови.
Combat Capable
I read an article today going over the armor losses of the Russian 4th Guards "Kantemirovskaya" Tank Division during the first phase of the SMO from February to the end of March last year - you can see it yourself
here: . This is an interesting and significant analysis for a couple of reasons. First of all, the authors dug into Oryx's infamous "database" of Russian armor losses and uncovered a bit about how their game is played, with the same vehicles listed multiple times over periods of months in some cases. That's not the really significant thing, however, because the only people who take Oryx seriously these days are particularly dull anti-Russian internet trolls and senior NATO officials. But I not only digress, I repeat myself.
More importantly, this article provides a window into the combat performance of the 4th GTD (and by extrapolation its parent unit, the 1st Guards Tank Army), which has been widely panned by commentators on both sides of the barricade. So the narrative goes, the Western Military District is run by influential peoples' nephews and does nothing but rehearse endlessly for the Moscow Victory Day Parade, and once sent into combat its "elite" units collapsed and immediately fled in a humiliating rout. Well, we have an analysis now - let's see how badly the 4th GTD got whipped in northeast Ukraine a year ago.
Our guys claim that the 4th GTD lost 74 tanks (mostly various models of T-80Us) during the battle, but it's important to remember that they're using Oryx's photos and many of those photos simply don't show losses. Others show completely burned-out T-80 wreckage claimed to belong to the 4th GTD, which isn't particularly reliable given Ukraine has plenty of those themselves. We can safely cut this down to 50 tanks actually lost either through destruction or capture.
The 4th GTD has seven tank battalions and a couple of independent companies with about 250 tanks total on its order of battle. Which means that over the course of a month of high-intensity combat over much of northeastern Ukraine, in which it destroyed several Ukrainian brigades before being withdrawn pursuant to an abortive peace deal, the 4th GTD was reduced to, at worst, 80% of its paper strength and would have suffered approximately 100 tank crewmen killed in action. Given that it would have been receiving replacements throughout the month-long battle (not to mention potentially pressing captured Ukrainian equipment into service) its strength probably never actually dropped below 90%.
By the way, I'm quite serious about those "several Ukrainian brigades" above. Knowing what we know now about what the Russian Army went into the SMO with vis-a-vis what the VSU had at the start of the war, the 4th GTD likely tackled and defeated a considerably superior enemy force during this battle. This could have been as bad as a 2:1 numerical disadvantage, including some of Ukraine's premiere units such as the 1st Tank Brigade based out of Chernigov.
Clearly the Guards deserve the title. The naysayers should say it to their faces or not at all.
