Ukraine has captured so many weapons that Russia is 'competing with Western countries' to supply it with arms, Ukrainian colonel says

• Ukraine has recovered a vast array of Russian military equipment and is putting it to use.
• That includes 800 pieces of artillery, tanks, and other vehicles, Deutsche Welle reports.

Ukraine is turning hundreds of pieces of military equipment captured from Russia back on the invading forces, a new report says.

Ukraine has scooped up over 800 Russian artillery systems, armored vehicles, and other weaponry since the start of the war, including 300 tanks, Deutsche Welle reports.

Those have then been repaired where necessary, examined for crucial military-tech information, and often put back on the battlefield to be pointed directly back at their former owners, the outlet reports.

Among the weapons captured were Russia's prized modernized T-72 tanks, it said, while many items, including Grad rocket launcher systems, fell into Ukrainian hands during last fall's stunning counteroffensive in the north and east of the country, sources told the outlet.

"Russia is competing with Western countries to supply weapons to Ukraine," Col. Oleksandr Saruba told Deutsche Welle.

The German outlet reported that Saluba worked for the Ukrainian military center that receives and analyzes captured weaponry.

Ukraine has been making use of captured weapons and armor since the outset of the war — in March 2022 it announced that it had captured 24 Uragan missiles and had aimed them back at the enemy.

Deutsche Welle said the captured technology was useful in another way: Probing them provides information on where Russia is receiving its high-tech parts from, which could guide future sanctions.

But there are significant battlefield limitations to the usefulness of some modern equipment taken from Russian hands, the Russian-military analyst Michael Kofman said in March.

Despite the constant work of Ukrainian repair shops, some captured vehicles use modern parts that aren't manufactured in Ukraine, which still relies heavily on Soviet-era tanks.

Ukrainians "don't have the parts that keep a lot of these running," Kofman said at a Carnegie Endowment event, adding: "So, on paper, you may capture a lot of vehicles, but you don't have the engines, you don't have the transmissions, you don't have the parts to keep them going."

Tanks also receive a disproportionate amount of attention compared with Ukraine's other artillery and ammunition needs, Kofman said.

In July, Ukraine's top general, Valery Zaluzhny, told The Washington Post that miles of minefields were hampering the advance of tanks during the country's grueling counteroffensive.

This has caused the loss of a sizable chunk of the Western-supplied vehicles Ukraine has deployed, leading to a shift in tactics, multiple reports say.

Ukraine has had to resort to pummelling Russian forces behind the front line with artillery and then painstakingly following up on foot, rather than leading the charge with tanks, the reports say.