Full record
MissgeopoliticsBy May 2023, Ukraine's tank/artillery force will be roughly four to six times its strength at the start of the war.
A scored prediction by Peter Zeihan, made on .
Scored prediction
Missgeopolitics“after a winter of doing a whole lot of deferred maintenance we're looking at the Ukraine military being roughly four to six times as powerful by next may as it is now”
By May 2023, Ukraine's tank/artillery force will be roughly four to six times its strength at the start of the war.
- Made on
- 2022-11-28
- Outcome
- Miss
- Importance
- 4 / 5
- Effect on score
- -1.78
What counted as right
- Status
- resolved
- Settled on
- 2023-05-31
By May 31 2023, Ukraine's deployed tank and artillery inventory is approximately 4-6x (at least ~5x for the high-end claim) its strength at the war's outset, per credible order-of-battle estimates.
Criterion: by May 31, 2023, Ukraine's deployed tank+artillery inventory is ~4-6x (≥~5x for the high end) its war-outset strength, per credible order-of-battle estimates. Outcome: not met by an overwhelming margin. Pre-war deployed strength ~858 MBTs; total Western tank transfers across the whole war were only ~336 (not all delivered by May 2023), against significant combat losses — implying net deployed armour stayed in roughly the same order of magnitude (~1x), not 4-6x. The same logic applies to artillery: Western howitzer deliveries (a few hundred) plus heavy losses did not multiply the force several-fold. Caveat: exact OOB tank/artillery counts for May 31 2023 are not published with precision in the sources reviewed, so the figure is an estimate — but the gap between observed deliveries/losses and a 4-6x requirement is so large that the criterion is clearly not satisfied. Recommend scoring stage corroborate with a dated IISS Military Balance 2023 OOB and an Oryx loss snapshot. No conflicting evidence pointing toward a 4-6x increase.
Sources
Ukrainian Consequences: Who Will Win...and When?
YouTube ·
Evidence of what happened
IISS Military Balance: Ukraine's pre-war (Feb 2022) deployed heavy-armour strength was about 858 main battle tanks (with a roughly comparable number in storage). A 4-6x deployed force by May 2023 would therefore require on the order of ~3,400-5,100 deployed MBTs — far beyond any plausible 2023 inventory.
Total Western/NATO tank transfers to Ukraine across the entire war amounted to only ~336 vehicles (Leopard 1A5/2A4/2A6, Strv 122, M1A1 Abrams, Challenger 2 combined), and not all had arrived by May 2023 (e.g., Abrams arrived autumn 2023). Even adding all Western deliveries to the pre-war fleet — and ignoring heavy combat losses — yields roughly 1.0-1.5x, nowhere near 4-6x. Ukraine also sustained substantial tank/armour losses through this period.
Open-source equipment-loss tracking (Oryx) and IISS loss analyses document heavy Ukrainian armour and artillery attrition through 2022-2023, meaning net inventory was being eroded by losses, not multiplied several-fold — inconsistent with a 4-6x increase in deployed tank/artillery strength.
Corrections
No public corrections.
Effect on the score
-1.78- How sure they sounded
- 85%
- Outcome
- Miss
- Importance
- 4 / 5
This page shows the scored prediction as published; the site doesn't recompute or adjust the score.
Where this came from
By May 2023, Ukraine's tank/artillery force will be roughly…- Methodology version
- v1.0.0
- Last computed
- August 2, 2026
- Made on
- 2022-11-28
How this profile was built
Scored by independent judges
Predictions gathered and sourced
Independently verified against sources