How have equipment-loss ratios between Russia and Ukraine changed month-by-month since January 2024?
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Executive summary
Since January 2024 open-source and intelligence reporting show Russian equipment losses outpacing Ukrainian losses by a wide margin, with aggregate attrition ratios reported variably between roughly 5:1 and 2:1 in Ukraine’s favor depending on period and weapon class (CSIS) [1]. Detailed month-by-month tallies are not published in the available sources, but multiple trackers and assessments indicate a spike in Russian losses in mid‑2024 and again during intensified autumn operations, with the evolving loss ratio peaking early and then fluctuating toward a lower—but still unfavorable—level for Moscow later in the year (GitHub; ISW) [2] [3].
1. January–March 2024: Ukraine’s early-year advantage and data caveats
Aggregate counts for 2024 show that Ukrainian forces inflicted heavy vehicle and artillery losses on Russia in the first quarter, contributing to loss ratios strongly favoring Ukraine, but most public sources aggregate rather than publish strict month-to-month breakdowns, and open-source databases like Oryx only count visually confirmed losses, which understate total attrition (Oryx; CSIS) [4] [1].
2. Spring–Summer 2024: A pronounced peak in Russian attrition
Several assessments identify June–July 2024 as a period of especially intense Russian equipment losses—ISW reports that Russian tank and armored-vehicle losses rose sharply during summer 2024 and that Ukrainian strikes destroyed or damaged thousands of Russian armored systems across 2024—driving the quarterly ratios sharply in Ukraine’s favor during these months [3].
3. Autumn 2024: High-intensity offensives and ratio volatility
ISW and related reporting cite September–October 2024 offensives in Donetsk Oblast as another episode of elevated Russian vehicle losses, producing fresh spikes in the overall loss ratio; CSIS’s broader analysis likewise notes that Russia’s repeated frontal assaults since January 2024 have produced unfavorable loss ratios for Moscow across different phases [3] [1].
4. Trendline summary: peaks, partial stabilization, and continued asymmetry
Open-source collations and analyst studies describe an evolving ratio that “increased sharply to Ukraine’s favor,” stabilized around ~3.5:1 for several months in the earlier part of the period, reached as high as 4–5:1 at certain peaks, and then drifted back toward lower but still disadvantageous figures—roughly in the 2:1–3:1 band—depending on the month and which equipment categories are counted (GitHub; CSIS) [2] [1].
5. Why month-to-month precision is unavailable in these sources
The available sources do not publish a complete, validated month-by-month ratio table: commercial think‑tank syntheses and the Ukrainian General Staff offer cumulative annual totals (ISW; Newsweek), open-source projects like Oryx only record visually confirmed losses (excluding many destroyed or damaged systems), and community trackers note early-period volatility from reporting cadence—so any strict calendar-month series would require access to proprietary or raw military logs not present in the cited reporting [3] [5] [4] [2].
6. Methodological and political caveats that shape apparent month-to-month changes
Differences in counting rules (destroyed vs. damaged vs. captured), varying update cadences, the visual‑evidence constraint of projects like Oryx, and potential incentives of official tallies (either Kyiv’s aggregation or Western analytic framing) mean reported month-to-month swings can reflect reporting artifacts as much as battlefield dynamics; CSIS explicitly links unfavorable Russian loss ratios to Russia’s tactics and production responses, underlining that replenishment and sourcing (domestic and foreign) also modulated observed ratios over time [4] [1].
7. Bottom line for a reader seeking a monthly series
The collective evidence in the cited sources documents clear months of elevated Russian losses (notably summer 2024 and autumn 2024) and an overall multi-month advantage for Ukraine in equipment attrition—ratios varying between roughly 5:1 at peaks and about 2:1 at troughs—but the public reporting does not provide a defensible, fully sourced month-by-month numeric series for January 2024 onward; assembling that would require harmonizing proprietary intelligence counts, official monthly tallies, and the conservative visual-confirmation databases [1] [3] [4] [2].