Vladimir Putin’s stupid war keeps getting stupider, now with Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin blaming Moscow for his organization’s massive losses in Bakhmut.
“I am withdrawing the units of PMC Wagner from Bakhmut because in the absence of ammunition they are doomed to senseless death,” NBC News quoted Prigozhin saying. He also claims his troops will withdraw to camps in the rear next week to “lick our wounds.”
Prigozhin made his statement in a video that the Kremlin has acknowledged seeing but has yet to respond to.
Let me give you a tiny bit of background because this is a complicated situation and one we aren’t really familiar with here in the West.
Russia kinda-sorta has three militaries. Their best troops are known as contract soldiers. They’re volunteers, well-paid by Russian standards and — most importantly — well-trained and well-equipped… at least by Russian standards. Russia’s regular forces are short-term draftees with little training, older equipment, and generally poor discipline. Filling in the gaps are mercenary groups like Prigozhin’s Wagner Group. Well-paid and generally well-equipped, the quality of Wagner mercs ranges anywhere from motivated young men looking for adventure to actual convicted felons promised their freedom… if they survive the war, of course.
Russia’s best forces, the contract troops, took it on the chin in the first weeks of a war that wasn’t supposed to last more than a few weeks. Of those, only a few specialist airborne and naval infantry units retain much combat power. It takes time and institutional knowledge to replace what the contract forces have lost. But there hasn’t been time to train new forces to that standard, and too many men with institutional knowledge got killed on the battlefields of Ukraine.
ASIDE: Prigozhin is known as “Putin’s Chef.” That’s because of his close relationship with the Russian strongman but also because, before he became a global mercenary chief responsible for the deaths of thousands, he worked as Putin’s caterer. I kid thee not.
So Putin has been drafting more and more lesser quality troops and arming them with older and older weapons, as I’ve detailed in earlier reports. “Quantity has a quality all its own” has often worked for Russia, so this isn’t necessarily a losing strategy.
Wagner Group has spent years doing much of Moscow’s dirty work in far-off places in Africa and the Middle East, places where Moscow didn’t want an official presence. Prigozhin was happy to rent out his forces to fight in Ukraine because, well, money is money.
That’s all the background you need. Sorry if that went on longer than I meant to.
Russian forces — all three varieties — have been trying to take the town of Bakhmut since last summer. In the process, the town is almost entirely rubble and virtually all of its 70,000 or so residents fled long ago. Bakhmut is of no real operational importance. It’s only being fought over so hard because Russia’s leadership decided to peg their prestige to taking it, and Ukraine’s decided it was worth making a stand to take Russia down a notch.
Russia is believed to have lost as many as 20,000 men trying to take Bakhmut — just since December, after Wagner forces had fully replaced the regular Russian troops originally tasked there. In just four or five months, Wagner/Russia have lost more than double all American lives lost over 20 years spent fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. All to take one stupid town, in one pointless and seemingly endless battle.
So when Prigozhin expresses some… frustration… over Moscow’s lack of support, it would take a heart of stone not to laugh. It’s a bitter laugh, not a hearty one — I’m no psycho.
That said, I’d be open to arguments that Prigozhin’s complaint is really just a propaganda ploy to make Russia’s war effort look weaker and more divided than it really is. Except for the fact that, after more than nine months of supreme effort, Ukraine still holds the western third of Bakhmut. Prigozhin is right to think that his Wagner mercs are being wasted as Putin’s cannon fodder because Kyiv’s cannons have left a whole lot of Russian fodder at Bakhmut.
We’ve seen the carnage. We’ve seen the lines on the map barely move. Bakhmut is network-centric, drone-age warfare being fought by Russia with all the tactical finesse of British Tommies ordered “over the top” of their own trenches to be ripped apart by well-entrenched German machine guns.
But this is Putin’s stupid war, and so long as Russians are willing to endure the pointless carnage, trying to take a country that is not theirs, the stupid war will continue.
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