ZAP // cv AP
Wagner group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin
Troops of convicted criminals allowed Russia to expand its army without resorting to larger ones. “Expendable troops” — so-called “cannon fodder” — were essential to Russia’s costly advance into Ukraine.
To compensate for the poor performance of its troops in the first months of the large-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia formed assault units in 2023. convicts and other “expendable”.
For Westerners, the solution was inhumane.
But for Vladimir Putin’s government, for whom only victory matters, sending job vacancies troops designed to absorb bullets allowed the most valuable Russian regular soldiers to conquer more ground in Ukraine, notes the .
The laboratory for this ruthless approach emerged in Batalha de Bakhmutin late 2022 and early 2023, when the mercenary army of Grupo Wagner employed assault units composed mainly of convicts who had been pardoned in exchange for fighting in Ukraine.
The Expendables deliberately sacrificed prisoners in their risky attacks on Ukrainian trenches, which largely explains their effectiveness in the war in Ukraine, and the .
This approach, combined with bombardment of the area with flat pumpslasted longer than the Wagner Group’s involvement, allowing Russian forces to conquer more territory without triggering unrest in the country that could threaten Putin’s government.
“Wagner – and the Battle of Bakhmut, to some extent – became a test bed for Russian forces to determine how best to exploit the convicts as an expendable force,” the researcher wrote. Michael Kofman in one of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace about Russian military adaptation.
“Wagner’s methods were brutal and coercivebut effective. The Russian military was interested in the second aspect and less concerned with the first”, adds Kofman.
Turn criminals into soldierss is not a new idea. In the US, judges used to offer defendants the choice between going to prison or joining the military; Currently, however, the American armed forces reject candidates with criminal records.
But Russia took this measure to a new levell due to a deep need. After lose about 700,000 soldiers through death, injury, or desertion in the nearly three years since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia would have to resort to mass conscription to replace its losses.
As prisons and jails are an easy source of expendable laborwithout provoking popular discontent among the Russian public regarding conscription.
As for criminals, the fact that many volunteer for suicide squads says a lot about conditions in Russian prisons.
Not that Russia has ever been particularly concerned about the lives of its soldiers. In World War II, the Red Army frequently used penal battalions for tasks such as clearing minefields under fire.
But even in these ways, the Wagner Group was ruthless. Their tactics “relied on simplicity and harsh punishment to force compliance,” Kofman writes. Soldiers who refused to advance, or who retreated without orders, were simply executed.
Wagner’s war was carried out at low cost. “Convict units were given cheap commercial cell phones without SIM cards,” notes Michael Kofman.
“The phones had offline maps installed with numerically indicated points and GPS. Wagner’s commanders ordered assault groups to advance with these predefined waypoints using cheap, unencrypted radios, and the convict robbery groups transmitted their locations with code words”, notes the investigator.
After nearly a year of bitter fighting, in May 2023, Russia may have suffered as many as 100,000 deaths and injuries, according to the US government.
“The attrition ratio was favorable to Ukrainewith an average rate of one in four in terms of deaths or serious injuries, with the majority of Russian casualties coming from Wagner troops,” Kofman writes. “Available sources suggest that 88% of Wagner’s losses throughout the battle of Bakhmut were among the condemned“.
As Ukrainian losses were smaller, but more felt. “The fighting exhausted experienced personnel on the Ukrainian side, while the Russian military could concentrate expendable artillery and infantry formations around Bakhmut in a troubled battle,” the researcher notes.
So one of the tragedies of the Ukraine war is that these inhumane tactics have shown to be quite effective — for any nation that is willing to treat its citizens as disposable.
