The Ukrainian soldier says that fighting Wagner is like a zombie movie
The fate of the Ukrainian mercenaries of the AKPNA group: the battlefield experience of ex-Wagner commander Gabidullin
The Ukrainians’ bodies lay side-by-side on the grass, the earth beside them splayed open by a crater. The victims were dragged to the spot by Russian mercenaries and given a pointed out location of their deaths.
“There is no need for a grenade, we will just bash them in,” another says of the Ukrainian soldiers who will come to collect the bodies. The mercenaries then realize they have run out of ammunition.
Battlefield experience is one of two factors ex-Wagner commander Gabidullin – who left the group in 2019 and has since published a memoir of his time working for them – says separates mercenaries from regular Russian troops, the other being money.
Limited official information about Wagner and long-standing Kremlin denials about its existence and ties to the Russian state have only added to its infamy and allure, while helping the group to cloud analysis of its exact capabilities and activities.
The Kremlin is Too Strong to Attack: A Defense Source of the Russian Army in Ukraine During the First Ukrainian-Bulgarian War
The Pentagon estimated that both sides had lost over 100,000 troops to death and injuries since Russia invaded Ukraine. (Neither side has divulged recent tallies of their war dead.) The math is in Moscow’s favor, according to Andriy. Russia’s population is about four times Ukraine’s, based on a Ukrainian government estimate.
They are more meaningful than the army. He said that the army were young soldiers who were forced to sign a contract.
“The Russian army cannot handle [the war] without mercenaries,” according to Gabidullin, adding that there’s “a very big myth, a very big obfuscation about a strong Russian army.”
“Wagner has been suffering high losses in Ukraine, especially and unsurprisingly among young and inexperienced fighters,” according to a senior US defense source speaking in September.
The senior Ukrainian defence source said that the German fighters have been offered bonuses for killing Ukrainian tanks and units based on intelligence gathered during the war.
According to Yusov, the Wagner is being used more and more to patch holes on the Russian side. The US senior defense official confirmed that this was true and that it was being used across different front lines by Chechen fighters, for example, who were focused around the Russian offensive aimed at Bakhmut.
He said that this has led to a lot of challenges, with the need to supply the troops with food and supplies, while the Ukrainians increased their attacks on Russia.
Online and via social media,Wagner’s invites to contact recruiters have also been spread. CNN contacted one recruiting agent who offered a monthly salary of about 240,000 rubles, about $4,000, with a business trip for at least four months. Much of the recruiter’s message listed medical conditions that excluded applicants from joining: from cancer to hepatitis C and substance abuse.
It’s a move that would have been unthinkable months ago for the private military company once considered one of the most professional units in the Kremlin’s arsenal.
Russian efforts to mobilize the prison population for combat include monthly salaries of thousands of dollars and death payments of tens of thousands of dollars to recruits’ families.
Working onUkrainian investigations into possible Russian war crimes Belousov fears that the scale of war crimes will rise because of this carelessness.
When Russian troops became unhappy: a man who quit selling drugs to make a lawyer to save his ill-gotten reputations in Ukraine
According to a recording of the man being questioned, the man is an engineer but had taken to selling drugs to make some money. He volunteered to join Wagner in the belief it would expunge his criminal record so that his daughter would have fewer problems following her dream to become a lawyer.
Wagner’s struggles in Ukraine have set in motion a wider problem: discontent in its ranks. For a group that depends on the appeal of its salaries and work, that’s critical.
In August, the Ukrainian intelligence services noted a decline in the morale and psychological state of the troops. He has also seen it in Russian troops.
The number of soldiers who are willing to volunteer for battle is decreasing, too, as a result of the reduction in Wagner recruitment requirements.
Ex-commander Gabidullin, who says he talks to his old comrades on an almost daily basis, explained that this demoralization was due to their dissatisfaction “with the overall organization of the fighting: [the Russian leadership’s] inability to make competent decisions, to organize battles.”
One mercenary contacted Gabidullin for advice and it was too much. He called me and told me he wouldn’t be there anymore. I’m not taking part in this anymore,’” Gabidullin told CNN.
On the first day of the Russian war with Russia, a soldier in Mykolaiv says: ‘We’re all there’
In one video, a fallen mercenary leans on the black earth as he lies in state. Around him, the battlefield smolders alongside dead bodies and the flaming wreckage of their armored vehicles. The shots are fired through the smoke.
“I’m sorry, bro, I’m sorry,” the soldier’s comrade says, lightly patting his back, stripped of his shirt by the battle that killed him. “Let’s get out of here, if they shoot us, we’ll lie next to him.”
STAVKY, Ukraine — Racing down a road with his men in pursuit of retreating Russian soldiers, a battalion commander came across an abandoned Russian armored vehicle, its engine still running. There was a rifle, rocket propelled grenades and helmets inside. The men were gone, but they were not there yet.
“They dropped everything: personal care, helmets,” said the commander, who uses the code name Swat. I don’t think it’s a special unit, but they are panicked. They dropped everything after the road was bad and it was raining very hard.
MYKOLAIV, Ukraine — On the second day of the war with Russia, Anatoliy Nikitin and Stas Volovyk, two Ukrainian army reservists, were ordered to deliver NLAW anti-tank missiles to fellow soldiers in the suburbs north of Kyiv. They received new orders after they stood exposed on the highway, proclaims the battle nickname Concrete.
“A guy on the radio said, ‘There are two Russian tanks coming at you. Try to hit one and livestream it!,” recalls Nikitin, sitting on a park bench in the southern city of Mykolaiv, as artillery rumbles in the distance.
There was one problem, neither soldier had ever fired an NLAW. As the tanks approached, they hid in some trees and watched a video on how to do it. They prepared the missiles.
“Then the commander said, ‘Oh, it’s ours!’ It’s ours! ‘” recalls Volovyk, who goes by the nickname Raptor. We did not fire. It was a really close call.”
When Russians Got Their Own Fireball: Nikitin and Volovyk recount their experiences in Mariupol, Severodonetsk and Lysychansk
They still rely on massive bombardments of indirect fire to destroy defensive positions. This was the tactic in the cities of Mariupol, Severodonetsk and Lysychansk last year. Remove anything standing that can be defended.
Nikitin and Volovyk have fought in both environments and describe their on-the-job training as a mix of terror, adventure and black comedy. The two men offer an unvarnished view of the fighting and say the first days of the war were filled with confusion.
“It was total chaos,” recalls Nikitin, who is 40, wears a salt-and-pepper beard and heads a construction company. “It’s lucky for us that the Russians were more chaotic than us.”
Volovyk learned English by playing video games. He says some of the early Russian actions were strange and that they have improved since. For instance, the Russians deployed riot police who headed toward Kyiv, only to be wiped out.
“We see how they advance, we see how they fight and we were like, ‘Okay, is this their best or are they just mocking us?'” recalls Volovyk, who wears a camouflage cap with the message “Don’t Worry, Be Ready.”
“It sucks,” says Volovyk. You dig. You dig. Unless you dig, you’re pretty much dead in the war, and that’s the only option you have.
The men were offered new jobs after a couple of weeks. Getting close to enemy lines and being able to evade detection is dangerous work. The men leaped at the chance to escape the trenches.
Their recon team, known as the “Fireflies,” has its own Instagram account and YouTube channel. Their videos show them launching a drone from a parched field and setting up in an abandoned farmhouse. Then they help guide a shell that just misses a Russian armored personnel carrier, enveloping it in a cloud of smoke. It’s a reminder that even with all the advanced technology, hitting a moving target is still hard.
Nikitin and Volovyk say they prefer military-grade surveillance drones to commercial ones. The military drones have secure data transfer and are much harder for the Russians to jam.
Some of the soldiers had heart-breaking moments. Nikitin recalls traveling with a team of engineers when they came across a Russian soldier in a field.
Max recalls that after finishing off the Russian soldier with four shots, all of our guys started to shoot.
Levy Nikitin: Fortresses, Clowns, and the Failure of the Soviet Army to Capture Bakhmut
Six years ago, they joined the army reserve. Nikitin says they weren’t prophets, but they knew Russia would try to take the rest of Ukraine. Their goal down south is to liberate Kherson.
The head of Russia’s Wagner private military company has attempted to explain his group’s failure to capture the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, which has for months been the scene of intense fighting.
During a New Year’s visit with fighters on the front line, Yevgeny Prigozhin said that there was “a fortress in every house” in Bakhmut, and that “only clowns that sit around and try to predict these things.”
The Russians will seize rubble if Bakhmut is captured. It’s a small town with little strategic importance and no remaining infrastructure to support an occupying force. The Russians have invested a lot in its capture, which indicates their poor strategy in this war.
“Then they say: ‘What does it mean to “break through the defense?”’ ‘Breaking through the defense’ means breaking through the defense of one house this morning, then you have to go break the defense of the next house, right?” he said.
Gallup’s up: the Wagner combined forces and Prigozhin’s firing in the UKraine-based artyomovsk operation
Who is going to take Artyomovsk? Which combined forces? It’ll be the Wagner combined forces,” he said. “And who else? Who else is there other than the company that makes it?
“They would round up those who did not want to fight and shoot them in front of newcomers,” he alleges. They brought two prisoners who wouldn’t fight. and they shot them in front of everyone and buried them right in the trenches that were dug by the trainees.”
Prigozhin has previously confirmed that Medvedev had served in his company, and said that he “should have been prosecuted for attempting to mistreat prisoners.”
“There were no real tactics at all. We got orders about the position of the adversary, but there was no clear order about how we should act. We planned how we would do it, step by step. Who would open fire, what kind of shifts we would have…How it how it how it would turn out that was our problem,” he said.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/30/europe/wagner-norway-andrei-medvedev-ukraine-intl/index.html
Oslo Observations of a Daring Defection and the Failure of Russia to Become a New Leader in the Era of the Second World War
Medvedev spoke to CNN from Oslo after crossing its border in a daring defection that, he says saw him evade arrest “at least ten times” and dodge bullets from Russian forces. He crossed into Norway over an icy lake using white camouflage.
He said that after witnessing troops being turned intocannon fodder, he didn’t want to come back for another tour.
He started off with 10 men under his command, a number that grew once prisoners were allowed to join, he said. There were more dead bodies and people coming in. He said that he had a lot of people under his command. “I couldn’t count how many. They were in constant circulation. Dead bodies, more prisoners, more dead bodies, more prisoners.”
But in reality “nobody wanted to pay that kind of money,” Medvedev said. He alleged that many Russians who died fighting in Ukraine were “just declared missing.”
The propaganda in Russia will stop soon and the people will rise up and all our leaders will be up for grabs as a new leader emerges.
When asked if he fears the fate meted on another Wagner defector, Yevgeny Nuzhin, who was murdered on camera with a sledgehammer, Medvedev said Nuzhin’s death emboldened him to leave.
The fight against Ukrainian forces in Odesa: a personal perspective of Andrey Zelensky (Russian Prime Minister), whose wife and three children have been martyred
Russian soldiers and their private military company are providing a significant number of ground forces, as well as heavy weaponry, in the fight against Ukrainian forces in the east of the country.
He says that another group is going to claim another 30 meters. “That’s how, step by step, (Wagner) is trying to move forward, while they lose a lot of people in the meantime.”
Only when the first wave is cut down and exhausted will more experienced men from the flanks join the battle to try to overrun the Ukrainian positions.
“Our machine gunner was almost getting crazy, because he was shooting at them. And he said, I know I shot him, but he doesn’t fall. He fell down after a while when he might bleed out.
“It looks like it’s very, very likely that they are getting some drugs before attack,” he says, a claim that CNN has not been able independently to verify.
The Ukrainian defenders found themselves surrounded, even though they ran out of bullets, after the first waves were eliminated.
The fields above Andriy’s bunkers are almost constant in sound. The whine of outgoing artillery is followed by a distant thud a few seconds later and a few kilometers away.
He told the engineer that he would be killed in battle. You are afraid to fight for your freedom in your country.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who was the country’s leading comedian, was contrasted with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Andriy, who is from the southwestern city of Odesa and joined up within days of Russia’s invasion, says that no matter how many more fighters are sent to storm their positions, they will resist.
“Most of my guys, they are volunteers. They had a good job and good salary, but they came to fight for their homeland. He says it makes a difference.
Max and a reconnaissance team clearing a trench of Russian troops: what is left of the dead soldiers in the Ukraine war-donbas army?
MAX, a UkrainianSniper, listens to an AC/DC song on his cellphone while he oiles his rifle in the early morning sunlight.
The night before, Max and a reconnaissance team were operating in enemy territory where they cleared a trench of six Russian troops that a fellow soldier had killed with a machine gun.
Inside the safe house where the Ukrainian team lives, the leader of the team lays out the contents of the dead men’s backpacks on the ground.
“They were really young, really, really young,” says Andriy, referring to the dead soldiers, “none older than 25 years old. They have been provided with nothing.”
“The Russian mobilizational reserve is pretty much infinite,” says Andriy, “which means that they have the luxury to make mistakes. Some of those people will be alright even if a brigade or platoon is lost. They can share their experience with the new conscripts.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1159671076/ukraine-war-donbas-russian-ukrainian-troops
The Ukrainian War: What do we do when we try to get close to the enemy and tell them to stop,” a Syrian soldier tells a soldier in Soledar
“They approach our positions, saying, ‘No, don’t shoot! We are your friends. This is how they try to get close to us,” Andriy says. “Our soldiers start to think, ‘OK, it’s our camouflage, so maybe it is our people.’ “
Max, Andriy and their teammates share a private house they commandeered. It is a mix of cozy domesticity and modern weaponry common near the front lines.
Max, who wears a military olive green hoodie, says that the football hooligans are a small army. He has a tattoo of a fanged bat on the back of his right hand and a snake on his left. I think my entire life was preparing me for this war.
“They’ve been told you either sit in the prison or you’ll get your freedom in the battlefield,” he says. They are only used as meat now. They push them in waves and waves and waves.”
Max says they push them forward under the threat of being shot. The conscripts “just go until they stumble into the enemy. The Russians see where we are and want to bomb it. “
People are sometimes reluctant to use it. Max was in the Ukrainian city of Soledar, about 40 miles east of here, when his team prepared an ambush. A soldier leading a group of Russian troops through the town was unaware that Max’s team was about 150 feet away.
“He looked like he was walking at the front of a parade,” recalls Max, incredulous. “Then some of our guys did something dumb,” he said. They shouted at him, ‘Stop!’ “
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1159671076/ukraine-war-donbas-russian-ukrainian-troops
Is the campaign to take soledar seriously? The battle against the Russians over Bakhmut, Mariupol, and Nazarenko
The view from the front line is more measured than Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s vow to push Russian soldiers out of Ukrainian lands.
Max wrote in a voice memo that it was ” cowboy-style shooting” in the hospital. When a grenade hit my butt, we began to think about what to do next.
They hit us from both sides with multiple-grenade launchers. I crawled into the trench and they bandaged my butt. But since I was the leader of the group, I couldn’t let the guys simply die. So, I took a rifle and I started firing back.”
Since he began fighting the Russians nearly nine years ago Max has only been wounded once. He says he doesn’t know how long it will take him to recover.
The Russians are on the verge of taking a Ukrainian city, which has already been abandoned by much of its prewar population.
If it was carried out in an orderly way, a Ukrainian withdrawal wouldn’t be as bad. Ryan believes that it should be treated as a routine tactic and not a sign of disaster.
The end game took place in Mariupol and other cities last year and involved men moving by street. But they were rarely Russian regulars, more often Chechen units, militia from the self-declared Luhansk and Donetsk Republics, and small numbers of Wagner operatives.
The campaign to take Soledar has been out of the same style but with one notable exception: the waves of infantry sent by Yevgeny Prigozhin’s group to flood Ukrainian defenses.
Bakhmut is an obsession for the Russians because no progress has been made elsewhere. The Russian defense ministry was anxious that Prigozhin had taken the bouquets, and so they started sending more troops to the area.
Ukrainian forces have been ordered to hold the line. Volodymyr Nazarenko, a deputy commander in the National Guard of Ukraine, said last week the Russians “take no account of their losses in trying to take the city by assault. The task of our forces in Bakhmut is to inflict as many losses on the enemy as possible. The cost of every meter of Ukrainian land to the enemy is hundreds of lives.
The lack of each within BTGs in the advance toward Kyiv a year ago was one of the reasons the campaign stuttered and failed. Russian troops were vulnerable to ambush.
The US Army War College Quarterly states: “Basic battle skills are substandard, and evidence suggests a significant lack of discipline.”
