What the Ukrainian soldiers had to do in the war against Russia and what they could have learned from the experience of mercenary combating the Cold War

The Ukrainians’ bodies lay side-by-side on the grass, the earth beside them splayed open by a crater. The victims were dragged to a location by Russian mercenaries and their arms pointed at the 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 realized they had run out of bullets.

Wagner is often described as Putin’s off-the-books troops. War crimes have been alleged in Africa, Syria and Ukraine as a result of its creation.

The group has been assisted in its analysis of its exact capabilities and activities by the Kremlin’s denials about its existence and other limited official information.

And as Russia’s prospects of victory in Ukraine – or even claiming a positive outcome – look thin, life as a Russian mercenary doesn’t hold the same appeal it might once have had.

“They have more weighty, more meaningful experience than the army. The army are young soldiers who were forced to sign a contract, they have no experience,” he said.

“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.”

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“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 intelligence gathered by Ukrainian authorities gave the idea that Wagner fighters were offered bonuses to wipe out Ukrainian tanks or units, all paid in US dollars.

Yusov said that there are holes in the Russian front line that are being patched with Wagner. A senior defense official from the United States confirmed this, and also said that the fighters of Chechen origin focused around the Russian assault on Bakhmut were different from the ones used in the US.

That has led to significant logistical challenges, he says, with the need to supply Wagner troops with ammunition, food and support for extended operations, all while Ukraine has upped its attacks on Russia’s logistics.

Social media and online were where the invitations to contact recruiters was spread. One recruiter contacted by CNN offered a monthly salary of “at least 240,000 rubles” (about $4,000) with the length of a “business trip” – code for a deployment – of 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.

Prigozhin’s apparent jailhouse recruitment drive matches broader Russian efforts to mobilize the country’s prison population for combat, offering monthly salaries worth thousands of dollars and death payments of tens of thousands of dollars to recruits’ families.

Working on Ukrainian investigations into possible Russian war crimes, Belousov fears that this lax recruiting will see the scale of war crimes increase.

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Although direct recruiting from prisons is a new step, it didn’t have to be an obstacle to employment with the company. He himself says he had served three years in prison for murder and told CNN of prominent Wagner commanders who had served around the world with the group after prison sentences.

Wagner’s struggles in Ukraine have set in motion a wider problem: discontent in its ranks. The appeal of salaries and work for a group is critical.

Ukrainian intelligence services noticed a decline in the psychological state of troops from phone calls in August, according to Yusov. It’s a trend he’s also seen in Russian troops more broadly.

The reduction in Wagner recruitment requirements point to demoralization too, he said, and the number of “truly professional soldiers who are willing to volunteer to fight with Wagner” is also decreasing.

The former commanding officer said the demoralization was caused by their unhappiness with the Russian leadership and their inability to make competent decisions.

For one mercenary who contacted Gabidullin for advice, that incompetence was too much. He told me that he wouldn’t be there anymore. Gabidullin told CNN that he is not taking part in this anymore.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/06/europe/wagner-ukraine-struggles-marat-gabidullin-cmd-intl/index.html

Breaking the defense: why do soldiers fight in battle? A New Year’s visit of Bakhmut with the Wagner army fails to rescue a Ukrainian fortress

One video shows a fallen mercenary lying on his deathbed, his left hand touching the black earth. There were dead bodies and flaming armored vehicles around him. There are shots that crackle through the smoke.

The soldier stripped of his shirt after the battle that he was killed in apologized lightly. If they shoot us, we are going to lie next to him.

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.”

“They say, ‘the combined forces have advanced into Artyomovsk and broken the defense,’” he said, referring to Bakhmut by its Soviet name. The name was changed back to Bakhmut in 2016.

“Then they said that breaking through the defense means you have to go break the defense of the next house, right?” He said so.

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Who is going to take Artyomovsk? Which forces worked together? He said it would be theWagner combined forces. “And who else? Other than Wagner PMC, who else is there?”

“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 refused to go fight They buried them in the trenches that the trainees dug, after shooting them in front of everyone.

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 weren’t any real tactics. We just got orders about the position of the adversary…There were no definite orders about how we should behave. We mapped out how we would go about it. 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

A man in Russia tries to run away from the enemy: he flees, but when does he realizes he is missing?

He escaped from Russian forces ten times and avoided being arrested after crossing the border, he said in an interview with CNN. He crossed into Norway over an icy lake using white camouflage to blend in, he said.

He told CNN that he knew by the sixth day of his deployment in Ukraine that he did not want to return for another tour after witnessing troops being turned into cannon fodder.

He started off with 10 men under his command, a number that grew once prisoners were allowed to join, he said. More dead bodies, and more and more people coming in. In the end I had a lot of people under my command,” he said. “I couldn’t count how many. They were in constant circulation. More dead bodies, more prisoners, more prisoners.

Even so, nobody cared about paying that kind of money. He alleged that many Russians who died fighting in Ukraine were “just declared missing.”

The propaganda in Russia will stop and the people will rise up so that the next leader can be found.

The man said the death of another defector, Yevgeny Nuzhin, who was murdered on camera with a sledgehammer, gave him the motivation to leave.

Two soldiers living Southwest of the city of Bakhmut are cut into the earth in a candle-lit shelter. For several weeks they have been confronting hundreds of fighters belonging to the Russian private military contractor Wagner throwing themselves against Ukrainian defenses.

He says there is a group that will claim another 30 meters. That is howWagner is moving forward, step by step, while they lose people in the meantime.

The first wave is exhausted or cut down, and the more experienced soldiers from the flanks are sent to overrun Ukrainian positions.

The fight against Russia in Odesa, Ukraine, for the people’s freedom – the example of Andriy Zelensky

“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.

CNN has not been able to verify a claim that it’s very likely that they are getting drugs before an attack.

Even after the first waves were eliminated, the attack continued as the Ukrainian defenders say they ran out of bullets and found themselves surrounded.

As he speaks to CNN, the fields above Andriy’s bunker reverberate to almost constant shelling. The whine of outgoing artillery is followed by a distant thud a few seconds later and a few kilometers away.

“Obviously, you will be killed in battle”, he told the engineer. But you’re afraid to fight for your freedom in your country.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who was once the country’s leading comedy star, was compared by Andriy to Russian President 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.

The majority of my guys are volunteers. They had good business, good job, and good salary, but they came to fight for their homeland. And it makes a great difference,” he says.