Forecasting Russian Equipment Losses Using Time Series and Deep Learning Models
This work addresses forecasting military attrition for analysts and policymakers, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a new dataset.
This study tackled the problem of forecasting Russian equipment losses in the Ukraine war by applying time series and deep learning models to open-source data, finding that TCN and LSTM models provided stable forecasts with high temporal granularity.
This study applies a range of forecasting techniques,including ARIMA, Prophet, Long Short Term Memory networks (LSTM), Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCN), and XGBoost, to model and predict Russian equipment losses during the ongoing war in Ukraine. Drawing on daily and monthly open-source intelligence (OSINT) data from WarSpotting, we aim to assess trends in attrition, evaluate model performance, and estimate future loss patterns through the end of 2025. Our findings show that deep learning models, particularly TCN and LSTM, produce stable and consistent forecasts, especially under conditions of high temporal granularity. By comparing different model architectures and input structures, this study highlights the importance of ensemble forecasting in conflict modeling, and the value of publicly available OSINT data in quantifying material degradation over time.