DISINFO: Ukraine has lost 680 aircrafts, almost 10,000 tanks since start of "Russia's military operation"
SUMMARY
Since day one of Russia's special military operation, a vast amount of Ukraine's military equipment has been destroyed, including 442 airplanes and 238 helicopters, as well as 9,939 tanks.
RESPONSE
The claim advances a recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative concerning Russia's illegal full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
According to FlightGlobal's directory of world air forces, the Ukrainian Air Force comprised a total of 207 airplanes and helicopters as at February 2022, including training and transport aircraft. Even accounting the support which Ukraine has received from its Western allies throughout the war, Moscow's claim of 680 destroyed aircraft still exceeds the cumulative size of Ukraine's fleet since February 2022.
Even more preposterous is the claim of nearly 10,000 Ukrainian tanks lost. According to the 2022 edition of The Military Balance, published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the Ukrainian forces had an estimated 987 tanks in service, with a further 1,132 vehicles in storage. This means that the Russian Armed Forces would have had to obliterate Ukraine's tank fleet nearly five times over for the Kremlin-cited figures to make sense.
The available visual evidence of Ukraine's hardware losses paints a far less dramatic picture. According to the Dutch open-source intelligence project Oryx Spioenkop, the Ukrainian Army had lost 557 tanks as of 2 July 2023, compared with 2,082 lost by Russia.
So why exaggerate? It appears that the tactic of this story is to contribute to a steady "background noise" suggesting that even if Russian loses are significant and much talked of, the Ukrainian loses are bigger. The aim is to undermine the popular will in the West to support Ukraine's self-defence and, to a pro-Kremlin audience, bolster the feeling of will to victory.