The Marketing Director of the Wagner mercenary company provides an informative summary of its successful operation to take the city of Bakhmut from the occupying Ukro-NATO forces.
- We fought in Bakhmut against superior forces, destroyed about 50,000 Ukrainian Armed Forces and wounded up to 70,000
- PMC “Wagner” had 3.2 times fewer dead than the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and about 2 times fewer wounded.
- The PMC in Artyomovsk had 50,000 people at its best, and the Armed Forces of Ukraine – 82,000, and the ratio for the assault should be 3 to 1 for the attackers.
- During the operation, I chose 50,000 prisoners, 20% of them died, another 20% were injured.
- The goal of Artemovsk was not Artemovsk itself, but the Bakhmut Meat Grinder. And in Artemovsk, we destroyed everyone we were supposed to destroy, we completed the task.
From this, we can glean a few useful observations. First, the Russians aren’t even using their military to accomplish their goals. Except for the initial attempt on Kiev, it appears their regular Army hasn’t suffered any significant losses at all. To date, they’ve primarily utilized convicts, Chechens, and ex-Ukrainian militia, and that has sufficed to devastate the Ukro-NATO forces.
Second, the Ukro-NATO military has been severely degraded. There is no way an outnumbered attacker should be able to drive a first-class military from prepared defenses, let alone in an urban environment. Wagner had one-fifth the number of troops the military textbooks say it required to take the city. Since it is not credible to suggest that a mercenary company consisting of convicts is a first-class organization, this suggests that the UFA forces are operating at a level more or less comparable to the Arab armies of the 1960s. This is not surprising, as conscript armies tend to be low-performance and low-morale.
Third, the Russian focus is on the enemy forces, not on the terrain. This is consistent with what Marshal Zhukov records in his memoirs of the Russian civil war and World War II. Consider the way in which Zhukov didn’t hesitate to advocate the early abandonment of Kiev in order to preserve its defenders, whereas Zaluzhnyi, like Hitler, refused to countenance the retreat from even a small, strategically meaningless city in order to conserve tens of thousands of soldiers.
Fourth, the real war hasn’t even started yet. The battle for the Donbass is little more than the opening skirmish in a much larger war between Clown World and the sovereign nations.