Ukrainian military Colonel Oleksandr Saruba told DW that the Ukrainian forces are now using a lot of Russian armaments and equipment seized earlier in the course of the full-scale war in their ongoing counter-offensive. Most of the captured equipment was abandoned by Russians during previous Ukrainian offensive operations.
“Russia is competing with Western countries to supply weapons to Ukraine,” joked Saruba.
Saruba, who works for the center within the Ukrainian armed forces that investigates the weapons, says that Ukraine now has in its possession more than 800 formerly Russian units of heavy equipment, including artillery systems, tanks, armored personnel carriers, electronic warfare equipment, air defense systems, and a number of various vehicles, including a mobile sauna. The captured small arms are numbering in their thousands.
Among the captured Russian heavy equipment, there currently are around 300 tanks, enough to supply ten tank battalions, according to Saruba.
According to the data by the Oryx visually confirmed losses tracker, in total, Ukrainian troops captured at least 932 pieces of Russian heavy equipment, and at least 141 tank.`
Not only the repairable equipment is useful, but also the destroyed weapons, debris, missile remnants, combat drones, instruction manuals – “everything which allows the Ukrainian forces to study the weapons used by Russia and develop their own tactics and countermeasures. This is one of the tasks of Saruba’s center, in addition to looking at the latest technology Ukraine can use when it comes to weapons development,” DW wrote.
Additionally, experts who study the captured equipment have found that Russia adapts its military production depending on the components it has in stock or what it expects to receive.
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