DISINFO: Ukrainian Army lost 1,500 armoured vehicles since the start of the counteroffensive
SUMMARY
Over the course of its counteroffensive initiated in early June, Ukraine has incurred significant losses, including the loss of hundreds of tanks, over 1,500 armoured combat vehicles, and substantial personnel casualties.
RESPONSE
The claim is part of an ongoing pro-Kremlin disinformation campaign concerning Russia’s illegal full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It attempts to push forward a recurring disinformation narrative portraying Ukraine's 2023 counteroffensive as a costly failure not providing any meaningful results.
The claim contradicts both the available evidence of Ukrainian hardware losses and Moscow's earlier statements on this issue. On 5 October 2023, Vladimir Putin stated that Ukraine had lost 1,900 armoured vehicles of all types since June. For unclear reasons, this number has now been reduced to 1,500.
According to a Dutch-based war tracking project, Oryx Spioenkop, the Ukrainian Armed Forces have lost a combined total of 2,013 since the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, including armoured personnel carriers, armoured fighting vehicles, infantry mobility vehicles, infantry fighting vehicles, and mine-resistant ambush-protected trucks. This number includes all vehicles that have been either destroyed, damaged, captured, or abandoned. Available evidence thus makes the Russian Defence Ministry's claim highly implausible.
See here and here for debunked claims casting the Ukrainian counteroffensive as a fiasco, and here for another instance of the Russian Foreign Ministry citing logically impossible numbers of Ukrainian equipment losses.