Oryx

Oryx, published at Oryxspioenkop, is a Dutch open-source intelligence blog founded in 2013 by researchers Stijn Mitzer and Joost Oliemans, both of whom had earlier worked at Bellingcat and, in Oliemans’s case, at the defence-data house Jane’s. Since Russia’s 2022 invasion it has become the most-cited reference for one specific question: how much equipment each side has visibly lost. Its “Attack On Europe” trackers list destroyed, damaged, abandoned, and captured tanks, vehicles, aircraft, and air-defence systems, each line hyperlinked to the photo or video that proves it.

The method is deliberately the opposite of automated. Every entry is confirmed by a human looking at imagery; nothing counts unless there is a picture or clip, captured-then-lost vehicles are credited only once to avoid double-counting, and ambiguous items are left out. The output is structured and machine-readable, which is why a growing layer of third-party tools, visualisers, and analytics now parse and chart Oryx’s figures — but the verification itself is people examining footage frame by frame. General David Petraeus has praised exactly that discipline, noting the counts are confirmed by photographs with metadata so the tally does not double-count.

The strength of the approach is also its built-in caveat. Because Oryx records only losses for which visual evidence circulates, its own maintainers stress that real losses run significantly higher; analysts at Forbes have treated the numbers as absolute minimum baselines rather than totals. After Mitzer and Oliemans stepped back, contributor Jakub Janovsky and collaborators including the WarSpotting effort carried the Ukraine counting forward. Reuters, the BBC, and others now quote Oryx as the conservative floor for battlefield attrition.