The Russian invasion of Ukraine is already leading to changes in NATO’s defence
concept and a reassessment of the principles of modern warfare. Ukraine’s unique
experience of confronting a much larger enemy force in terms of manpower and
hardware is being taken into account in this reassessment.
NATO’s military strategy is changing and moving towards the principle of defending every
square inch of Allied territory from Day 1 of a potential conflict, instead of the previous
strategy of retaliation. The latter strategy assumed that in the event of an attack on any
NATO member country, other Allies would take time to consult to draw up a response. It was
also assumed that at the initial stage of aggression, the concerned NATO member could be
partially or completely occupied until the main Allied forces arrived to engage the adversary.
However, following the atrocities committed by Russian troops in Ukraine, such an approach
would be unacceptable. Implementing the new approach requires strengthening defences in
case of potential aggression, which in turn requires clearly understanding the threat. During
its invasion of Ukraine, Russia has deployed huge military formations, with large numbers of
armoured vehicles and artillery, many of them dating back to the Soviet era. The question for
NATO is how effective this approach could be under modern conditions.
Having launched a full-scale war against Ukraine, Russia has been unable to abandon the
use of Soviet-era military equipment, despite boasting in previous years about the production
and supply of modern equipment to their troops. This new equipment includes the T-72B3M,
T-80BVM, and T-90M main battle tanks (MBTs), BTR-82A armoured personnel carriers
(APCs), BMP-2M infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs), BMPT ‘Terminator’ fire support vehicles,
along with various others. The massive losses of Russia’s newest military equipment in the
first months of the invasion has led to Russia being forced to reactivate and refurbish older
models for deployment in order to plug capability gaps incurred through losses.
Old Equipment from Russian Stocks
Since the start of the war, Russia has removed approximately over 40% of its Soviet-era
tanks and APCs from the largest mothballed equipment base in Buryatia. This certainly
represents a significant figure, but Russia has another 20 smaller, similar storage bases,
which can also be used to reconstitute units destroyed in combat. Before the start of
Ukraine’s summer offensive, the Oryx blog estimated that Russia had lost over 10,000 units
of heavy armoured equipment, including 7,000 irretrievably destroyed, and more than 2,800
captured by the Ukrainian Armed Forces. The Oryx blog’s tally only includes confirmed
losses, verified by photos or video evidence. However, despite giving a good approximation
