It was one of the many episodes since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in which the whole world was able to watch in detail a battle that would otherwise have been shrouded in the fog of war. Just a month later, Russia’s war against its neighbor may already be one of the most photographed and documented conflicts in recent history. Ukrainian civilians, the army and front-line journalists all contributed to a mass of real-time visual information by sharing images and videos on social media. Every day, dozens of images of burned tanks, abandoned refueling trucks and demolished helicopters in Ukraine appear on Twitter, TikTok, Instagram and Telegram. During the first three weeks of the conflict, when Russian forces appeared to be facing logistics and fuel problems, videos of Ukrainian farmers towing abandoned Russian military vehicles appeared at least once a day – so much so that it became a meme. This mass of information has allowed open source intelligence experts and volunteers to gain an insight into this war that might have been available in the past only to government intelligence services. They managed to document thousands of images and videos of damaged and abandoned equipment to tell one of the most important stories of this war to date: the massive destruction of Russian military equipment and the stagnation of a military superpower. Only from open source data – ie images and videos shared on the internet – one part-time weapons monitoring team has recorded a total of 2,055 Russian military vehicles destroyed, abandoned or captured by Ukrainian forces. That number includes 331 tanks, 235 armored combat vehicles, 313 infantry fighting vehicles and 40 surface-to-air missile systems, according to the Oryx Blog, which is managed by military analysts Stijn Mitzer and Joost Oliemans. The couple performs the monitoring function in their free time and posts on Twitter their discoveries as they go. Any money they make through their Patreon goes to charities that help citizens in Ukraine. Their list, they added in a preamble, “includes only damaged vehicles and equipment for which photographic or video evidence is available. “Therefore, the amount of equipment destroyed is significantly higher than that recorded here.” The list tells a story. Long before the Pentagon spreads news of combat and control zones in the newsroom, it is possible to determine the outcome of attacks from documented equipment losses. A damaged Russian column outside a city north of Kiev, where Russian forces were trying to break into, for example, will show that their efforts are not going very well. In the first two weeks of the invasion, the volume of Russian equipment losses documented by weapons trackers was one of the first signs that the operation was not going well for the Russian army. The losses were so great that the team at Oryx was overwhelmed. “I can not go on,” they wrote on Twitter in response to a video showing Ukrainian forces seizing 30 Russian vehicles near Kharkov. Maintaining a list requires almost constant attention – late at night browse through cluttered images and videos to keep it up to date. “You have to be crazy enough to start it, and even crazier to keep going,” Mitzer told The Independent. He added that his team follows a strict methodology for verifying and documenting the videos and images he finds. They first compare it to their existing database to see if it is new. This process “takes a long time and will become more time consuming as the number of losses increases further,” he said. They then analyze the scene – whether it is a column of damaged tanks or an abandoned air defense system – to identify the equipment and understand how it came to an end. “It has either been destroyed, occupied or abandoned. “Sometimes they ran out of fuel, other vehicles got stuck in a ditch or were ambushed by Ukrainian forces,” Mitzer said. “Usually there is a story to be told, especially when combined with reports of geographical location and subsequent action,” he added. Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the Institute for Foreign Policy Research and a former U.S. Marine who also watched the videos, said Russian casualties tell us as much about the future of the war as they do today. “At some point the losses become so significant that they affect their ability to function,” he said. “When you can see that valuable equipment of a division or many regiments is being lost in an area, the whole operation will suffer.” “He tells you that their ability to do certain things aggressively in the future is quite limited, because they probably do not have the numbers,” he added. Mr. Lee, who specializes in Russian weapons systems, records open source data from the battlefield and locates damaged or abandoned equipment wherever possible. He did similar work throughout the war in Syria, but this conflict provided a much larger source of material for you to work on. “Many wars in Ukraine are fought in very large population centers where people have telephones, social media and everything else. We will see more battle videos from these areas than anywhere else. “So from that point of view it is somewhat unique,” he said. The open source technical information community monitoring equipment losses is a combination of part-time professionals and amateurs. By definition, open source research can be done by anyone with an Internet connection, so the line between professionals and amateurs is often blurred. Bellingcat, an investigative journalism organization specializing in open source intelligence, began its life as a company run by founder Eliot Higgins and has grown into an international giant. Another group, Ukraine Weapons Tracker, has created a Twitter account of 375,000 followers a month since the conflict began. He is led by a group of two people, one of whom is a UK clerk on a daily basis, who spoke to The Independent on condition of anonymity. They also said that the size of the Russian losses was the most important finding of their documentation so far. But what also stands out is the level of detail about how the war is being waged that this small group can draw from the images it finds. In the first two weeks of the invasion, large Russian convoys were disappearing from attacks by Ukrainian drones, said Ukraine volunteer Weapons Tracker. The images from these burnt columns showed that the Russian military planners were unprepared for a theater in which Russia had no aerial domination. Then images of a different kind of catastrophe began to appear. “The Russians decided to reduce the size of their convoys and give them escorts. “Instead, these smaller convoys are being beaten by special forces or local defense forces,” said Ukraine Weapons Tracker volunteer. “So instead of two huge escorts [being destroyed]you receive five or six minor incidents a day, “they added. Both Mr. Lee and the people behind the Ukraine Weapons Tracker have done similar work in other war zones – most notably Syria and Iraq. But the scale of equipment losses in Ukraine, most of Russia, was unprecedented. “In Syria and Iraq, it is remarkable if one captures 10 AK-47s by another. We would not even bother to touch it here, because that’s exactly the large scale you are talking about. “We no longer look at small arms, we only look at armored vehicles,” said the volunteer. A satellite image shows the southern tip of the artillery trucks, east of Antonov Airport, Ukraine (Reuters) Although trackers monitored equipment on both sides, Ukraine’s losses were generally more difficult to track because Ukrainian civilians were less likely to film them. Even with this potential information gap, the scale of Russian losses, especially in the first two weeks, was “almost impossible” for full tracking of trackers, Mr Li said. This was revealing in many ways. “I think that contrary to what many people expected, we are talking about a conflict of almost peers. Because of this, the scale [of Russian losses] “It’s just huge,” he said. “We are not talking about a counter-insurgency. We are not talking about a police operation. We are not talking about a special company, quote, unquote. You are talking about two sides, which do not fit evenly, but not so far apart “. It is a tragic job, everyone agrees. The job of the trackers is to document the equipment, but none of them forget that each of these tanks or trucks is operated by one person. “For every soldier killed you see, a family is falling apart, a gap is being created that will never be filled,” Mitzer said. “The plans of a tank that suffers a catastrophic explosion look impressive, but they also end up at the end of three lives. Soldiers who probably never wanted this war. “Soldiers who have families and dreams like you and me.”
title: “The Russian Military Is Losing So Much Equipment That Weapons Monitors Are Overwhelmed " ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-03” author: “Josephine Seiber”
It was one of the many episodes since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in which the whole world was able to watch in detail a battle that would otherwise have been shrouded in the fog of war. Just a month later, Russia’s war against its neighbor may already be one of the most photographed and documented conflicts in recent history. Ukrainian civilians, the army and front-line journalists all contributed to a mass of real-time visual information by sharing images and videos on social media. Every day, dozens of images of burned tanks, abandoned refueling trucks and demolished helicopters in Ukraine appear on Twitter, TikTok, Instagram and Telegram. During the first three weeks of the conflict, when Russian forces appeared to be facing logistics and fuel problems, videos of Ukrainian farmers towing abandoned Russian military vehicles appeared at least once a day – so much so that it became a meme. This mass of information has allowed open source information experts and volunteers to gain an insight into this war that might have been available in the past only to government intelligence services. They managed to document thousands of images and videos of damaged and abandoned equipment to tell one of the most important stories of this war to date: the massive destruction of Russian military equipment and the stagnation of a military superpower. Only from open source data – ie images and videos shared on the internet – one part-time weapons monitoring team has recorded a total of 2,055 Russian military vehicles destroyed, abandoned or captured by Ukrainian forces. That number includes 331 tanks, 235 armored combat vehicles, 313 infantry fighting vehicles and 40 surface-to-air missile systems, according to the Oryx Blog, which is managed by military analysts Stijn Mitzer and Joost Oliemans. The couple performs the monitoring function in their free time and posts on Twitter their discoveries as they go. Any money they make through their Patreon goes to charities that help citizens in Ukraine. Their list, they added in a preamble, “includes only damaged vehicles and equipment for which photographic or video evidence is available. “Therefore, the amount of equipment destroyed is significantly higher than that recorded here.” The list tells a story. Long before the Pentagon spreads news of combat and control zones in the newsroom, it is possible to determine the outcome of attacks from documented equipment losses. A damaged Russian column outside a city north of Kiev, where Russian forces were trying to break into, for example, will show that their efforts are not going very well. In the first two weeks of the invasion, the volume of Russian equipment losses documented by weapons trackers was one of the first signs that the operation was not going well for the Russian army. The losses were so great that the team at Oryx was overwhelmed. “I can not go on,” they wrote on Twitter in response to a video showing Ukrainian forces seizing 30 Russian vehicles near Kharkov. Maintaining a list requires almost constant attention – late at night browse through cluttered images and videos to keep it up to date. “You have to be crazy enough to start it, and even crazier to keep going,” Mitzer told The Independent. He added that his team follows a strict methodology for verifying and documenting the videos and images he finds. They first compare it to their existing database to see if it is new. This process “takes a long time and will become more time consuming as the number of losses increases further,” he said. They then analyze the scene – whether it is a column of damaged tanks or an abandoned air defense system – to identify the equipment and understand how it came to an end. “It has either been destroyed, occupied or abandoned. “Sometimes they ran out of fuel, other vehicles got stuck in a ditch or were ambushed by Ukrainian forces,” Mitzer said. “Usually there is a story to be told, especially when combined with reports of geographical location and subsequent action,” he added. Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the Institute for Foreign Policy Research and a former U.S. Marine who also watched the videos, said Russian casualties tell us as much about the future of the war as they do today. “At some point the losses become so significant that they affect their ability to function,” he said. “When you can see that valuable equipment of a division or many regiments is being lost in an area, the whole operation will suffer.” “He tells you that their ability to do certain things aggressively in the future is quite limited, because they probably do not have the numbers,” he added. Mr. Lee, who specializes in Russian weapons systems, records open source data from the battlefield and locates damaged or abandoned equipment wherever possible. He did similar work throughout the war in Syria, but this conflict provided a much larger source of material for you to work on. “Many wars in Ukraine are fought in very large population centers where people have telephones, social media and everything else. We will see more battle videos from these areas than anywhere else. “So from that point of view it is somewhat unique,” he said. The Open Source Intelligence Loss Tracking community is a combination of part-time professionals and amateurs. By definition, open source research can be done by anyone with an Internet connection, so the line between professionals and amateurs is often blurred. Bellingcat, an investigative journalism organization specializing in open source intelligence, began its life as a company run by founder Eliot Higgins and has grown into an international giant. Another group, Ukraine Weapons Tracker, has created a Twitter account of 375,000 followers a month since the conflict began. He is led by a group of two people, one of whom is a UK clerk on a daily basis, who spoke to The Independent on condition of anonymity. They also said that the size of the Russian losses was the most important finding of their documentation so far. But what also stands out is the level of detail about how the war is being waged that this small group can draw from the images it finds. In the first two weeks of the invasion, large Russian convoys were disappearing from attacks by Ukrainian drones, said Ukraine volunteer Weapons Tracker. The images from these burnt columns showed that the Russian military planners were unprepared for a theater in which Russia had no aerial domination. Then images of a different kind of catastrophe began to appear. “The Russians decided to reduce the size of their convoys and give them escorts. “Instead, these smaller convoys are being beaten by special forces or local defense forces,” said Ukraine Weapons Tracker volunteer. “So instead of two huge escorts [being destroyed]you receive five or six minor incidents a day, “they added. Both Mr. Lee and the people behind the Ukraine Weapons Tracker have done similar work in other war zones – most notably Syria and Iraq. But the scale of equipment losses in Ukraine, most of Russia, was unprecedented. “In Syria and Iraq, it is remarkable if one captures 10 AK-47s by another. We would not even bother to touch it here, because that’s exactly the large scale you are talking about. “We no longer look at small arms, we only look at armored vehicles,” said the volunteer. A satellite image shows the southern tip of the artillery trucks, east of Antonov Airport, Ukraine (Reuters) Although trackers monitored equipment on both sides, Ukraine’s losses were generally more difficult to track because Ukrainian civilians were less likely to film them. Even with this potential information gap, the scale of Russian losses, especially in the first two weeks, was “almost impossible” for full tracking of trackers, Mr Li said. This was revealing in many ways. “I think that contrary to what many people expected, we are talking about a conflict of almost peers. Because of this, the scale [of Russian losses] “It’s just huge,” he said. “We are not talking about a counter-insurgency. We are not talking about a police operation. We are not talking about a special company, quote, unquote. You are talking about two sides, which do not fit evenly, but not so far apart “. It is a tragic job, everyone agrees. The job of the trackers is to document the equipment, but none of them forget that each of these tanks or trucks is operated by one person. “For every soldier you see killed, a family is falling apart, creating a gap that will never be filled,” Mitzer said. “The plans of a tank that suffers a catastrophic explosion look impressive, but they also end at the end of three lives. Soldiers who probably never wanted this war. “Soldiers who have families and dreams like you and me.”
