Soaring Death Toll Gives Grim Insight Into Russian Tactics
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/02/us/politics/ukraine-russia-casualties.htmlWASHINGTON — Moscow is sending poorly trained recruits, including convicts, to the front lines in eastern Ukraine to pave the way for more seasoned fighters, U.S. and allied officials say.
The number of Russian troops killed and wounded in Ukraine is approaching 200,000, a stark symbol of just how badly President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion has gone, according to American and other Western officials.
While the officials caution that casualties are notoriously difficult to estimate, particularly because Moscow is believed to routinely undercount its war dead and injured, they say the slaughter from fighting in and around the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut and the town of Soledar has ballooned what was already a heavy toll.
With Moscow desperate for a major battlefield victory and viewing Bakhmut as the key to seizing the entire eastern Donbas area, the Russian military has sent poorly trained recruits and former convicts to the front lines, straight into the path of Ukrainian shelling and machine guns. The result, American officials say, has been hundreds of troops killed or injured a day.
Russia analysts say that the loss of life is unlikely to be a deterrent to Mr. Putin’s war aims. He has no political opposition at home and has framed the war as the kind of struggle the country faced in World War II, when more than 8 million Soviet troops died. U.S. officials have said that they believe that Mr. Putin can sustain hundreds of thousands of casualties in Ukraine, although higher numbers could cut into his political support.
Ukraine’s casualty figures are also difficult to ascertain, given Kyiv’s reluctance to disclose its own wartime losses. But in Bakhmut, hundreds of Ukrainian troops have been wounded and killed daily at times as well, officials said. Better trained infantry formations are kept in reserve to safeguard them, while lesser prepared troops, such as those in the territorial defense units, are kept on the front line and bear the brunt of shelling.
The last public Biden administration estimate of casualties came last November, when Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that more than 100,000 troops on each side had been killed and wounded since the war began. At the time, officials said privately that the numbers were closer to 120,000.
“I would say it’s significantly well over 100,000 now,” General Milley said at a news conference last month in Germany, adding that the Russian toll included “regular military, and also their mercenaries in the Wagner Group.”
That does not include bodies cremated by Russians in the mobile crematoriums. No bodies, no payments to families.
Russians do not care how many of its citizens they kill in this clusterfuck. Nobody is counting them.
The reports from the frontlines show that they send them in waves with losses in the 80%+ for each wave.
Some Ukrainian servicemen describe the attack on Bahmut as a surreal Zombie movie.
The Wagnerites get a few rounds of 7.62 and keep going until they lose enough blood and drop dead.
Nobody is picking up their bodies, new waves come in, and get chopped up, and this is repeated, for each 100m of advance.
I think Putin is prepared to sacrifice millions, so I think Ukrainians need to change something, as they might not be able
to sustain this type of attrition war.
Hint: Logistics wins wars.