In a football analogy the Russians are more like a Bill Walsh 49er's team in the 80's, doing some new things but also having overwhelming talent in the game, the equivalent of playing with 12 men on the field every snap. Massive production of artillery shells from ancient factories is what leads the statistical analysis, but it's not the complete picture.
One of the sleeper stories of the war has been the extraordinary capability of Russian air defenses, with what had been thought to be mundane systems evolving to be able to intercept the most difficult targets. Russian SAMs are routinely downing GMLRS, Storm Shadows, and even AGM-88 HARMs. Russian air defenses in the Crimea have even been downing ATACMS, and EW elsewhere have
reduced Excalibur ammo efficiency to 6 percent.
But most remarkable is the fact the Russians seem to have an absolutely bottomless supply of modern air defense missiles. Just last week the Russian MoD reported that they had shot down 1,715 aerial targets, some 95% of them drones. The Russian BDA reports are a good proxy for Russian ammunition consumption more than an accurate figure to trust on what they shot down. Even assuming 75% of the drones were engaged with small arms or EW, that's still some 400 antiaircraft missiles expended for the week.
And the Russians do this, week after week after week and they've been doing it for over two years now. And they've shown zero indication their air defense inventory is even under stress, missile systems are probably the one area where we've never seen them bring old systems back into service from the bunkers. Meanwhile the West is simply out of modern missiles and desperately trying to keep Ukraine going with systems from the 1960s like HAWK, Chaparral and improvised Sea Sparrow launchers, and helping the UFA cope by modifying/using ancient stuff like SA-5's.
Guided missiles are not simple items to make - they're very complex and require sophisticated manufacturing to tight tolerances. Western manufacturers have never produced them large quantities quickly, even at the height of the Cold War. And yet here the Russians are stamping out enough ammunition to keep their Buks and Pantsirs on the firing line after two years of a war featuring an order of magnitude more aerial targets than any previous conflict, and EW systems every 10km on a huge front.
In war materiel (sophisticated as well as simple/cheap), as well as manpower, the Russians are clearly winning. The trade
sanctions aren't working, and the Ukrainians themselves report on the surge in weapons being used against them (going from 20 to 150 glide bombs a day):
