The Russian Army in the Crossroads: From the War to the Future: The Case of Ukrainian mercenaries in the Cold War

The bodies of the Ukrainians lay side by side on the ground, the earth behind them open by a crater. The Russian mercenaries dragged the victims to the spot where they had died, and they pointed to where they had died.

One person says that the Ukrainian soldiers who will come to collect the bodies won’t need a grenade. The mercenaries realized they had run out of bullets.

The grim reality of the war can be seen in footage provided to CNN which shows the group’s operations.

With limited official information about it’s existence and ties to the Russian state, the group was able to cloud analysis of its exact capabilities and activities.

Russia “has responded to battlefield struggles in Ukraine by turning to its past model of fielding a large conscript force,” says the Modern War Institute. “In some ways this mirrors the tension between Russia’s pursuit of a technologically sophisticated way of war and its longstanding bias for simple, rugged mass.”

They have 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, who also said that there is a big myth about a strong Russian army.

Prigozhin’s jailhouse recruiting drives have not stopped Russia from acting as a military force in the early 1917-1918 Ukrainian conflict

A senior US defense source said in September thatWagner has been suffering high losses in Ukraine and that they were young and inexperienced fighters.

Wagner fighters have even been offered bonuses – all paid in US dollars – for wiping out Ukrainian tanks or units, according to a senior Ukrainian defense source and based on the intelligence gathered on Wagner since the start of the war by Ukrainian authorities.

According to that report, if Wagner forces succeed in taking a position, artillery support allows them to dig foxholes and consolidate their gains. According to Ukrainian intercepts, coordination between Wagner and the Russian military is often lacking.

The logistical challenges have been caused by the need to keep the troops supplied with food and equipment while the Ukranian army is attacking Russia’s logistics.

Social media and online have been used to spreadWagner’s invitations to contact recruiters. 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. The medical conditions that excluded applicants from joining were listed in the recruiter’s message.

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.

Wagner’s struggles in Ukraine: The demoralization of its ranks and the discontent of their ranks, as reported by a former comrade of Gabidullin

Gabidullin stated that a criminal record wasn’t an obstacle to employment with Wagner, although direct recruitment from prisons is a new step. He tells CNN that he served 3 years in prison for murder and that some of the commanders from around the world he served with after prison sentences had served with him.

Wagner’s struggles in Ukraine have set in motion a wider problem: discontent in its ranks. For a group that depends on the appeal of its salaries and work, that’s critical.

From intercepted phone calls, Ukrainian intelligence services in August noted a “general decline in morale and the psychological state” of Wagner troops, Ukrainian defense intelligence spokesman Yusov said. 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.

Ex-commander Gabidullin, who says he talks to his old comrades on an almost daily basis, explained that this demoralization was due to their dissatisfaction “with the overall organization of the fighting: [the Russian leadership’s] inability to make competent decisions, to organize battles.”

It wasn’t enough for one mercenary to get advice from Gabidullin. He called and said that he wouldn’t be there anymore. I’m not taking part in this anymore,’” Gabidullin told CNN.

Tracking down Russian tanks by using drones and artillery in a high-tech trench warfare in the farm fields of Mykolaiv, Ukraine

In one video, a fallen mercenary lies lifeless in the ground, his right hand touching the black earth. Around him there were dead bodies and flaming armored vehicles. Through the smoke shots can be heard.

The soldier’s comrade stripped of his shirt and apologized lightly, but he didn’t say much more. If they shoot us, we will lie next to him.

STAVKY, Ukraine — Racing down a road with his men in pursuit of retreating Russian soldiers, a battalion commander came across an abandoned Russian armored vehicle, its engine still running. In the room was a rifle, grenade, helmet, and belongings. The men were gone.

“They dropped everything: personal care, helmets,” said the commander, who uses the code name Swat. “I think it was a special unit, but they were panicking. It was raining very hard, the road was bad and they drop everything and move.”

On the second day of the war with Russia, the Ukrainian army ordered two soldiers to deliver anti-tank missiles to their friends in the suburbs north of Kyiv. Then, as they stood exposed on a highway, Nikitin, who goes by the battle nickname Concrete, says they received new orders.

“A guy on the radio said, ‘There are two Russian tanks coming at you. Try to hit one and livestream it!,” recalls Nikitin, sitting on a park bench in the southern city of Mykolaiv, as artillery rumbles in the distance.

There was one problem: neither soldier had ever fired an NLAW. So, as the tanks approached, they hid amongst some trees and looked up a YouTube video on how to do so. They took their positions, prepared the missiles.

“Then the commander says, ‘Oh, it’s ours! It’s ours! Volovyk, who goes by the nickname Raptors, recalls. We didn’t fire. It was a really close call.”

Soldiers used shoulder-launched missiles and hit-and-run tactics to defend Kyiv. These days, they are using drones and artillery as part of a high-tech trench war in the farm fields of the country’s’ south.

Nikitin and Volovyk have fought in both environments and describe their on-the-job training as a mix of terror, adventure and black comedy. The two men offer an unvarnished view of the fighting and say the first days of the war were filled with confusion.

“It wasn’t easy, and there was a lot of confusion,” says the beard wearing boss of a construction company. It’s fortunate that the Russians were more chaotic than us.

Volovyk is a 33-year-old software engineer who learned English by playing video games. He says Russian tactics and decision-making have improved during the war, but he found some of their early actions perplexing. For instance, the Russians deployed riot police who headed toward Kyiv, only to be wiped out.

Volovyk wears a camouflaged cap with the message “Don’t worry, be ready” and was wondering if they were just mocking him.

“I don’t like it,” says Volovyk. “You dig. You dig. That’s the only thing you can do, because this is an artillery war and unless you dig, you’re pretty much dead.”

Two weeks later, the men were offered new jobs. It’s dangerous work that involves getting close to enemy lines and trying to evade detection. The men were prepared to take any chance to get out of the trenches.

They now operate drones and serve as the eyes of the artillery, helping to guide fire on everything from Russian tanks to ammunition depots in the Kherson region.

Nikitin and Volovyk say they prefer military-grade surveillance drones to commercial ones. The military drones have secure data transfer and are much harder for the Russians to jam.

The soldiers have been through some difficult times. The engineer recalls traveling with a team of people when they came across a soldier.

“After I finished off the Russian soldier, all of our guys started to shoot, it was the funniest thing I have ever seen,” says Max.

Bakhmut: How the Russians fought to seize Kherson, the largest city in Ukraine, during the First World War II: The Yukawa regime

Nikitin and Volovyk joined the army reserve six years ago, after the Russians invaded Crimea. They were not prophets but they knew Russia would try to take the rest of the country. Here down south, their goal is to liberate Kherson, the regional capital.

In recent months, there has been intense fighting in the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, and the head of Russia’s Wagner private military company tried to explain his group’s failure to capture it.

During his New Year’s visit with fighters, Yevgeny Prigozhin stated that there was a fortress in each house and only clowns could predict it.

As Mick Ryan writes: “If the Russians do capture Bakhmut, they are seizing rubble. It is a small town with hardly any remaining infrastructure to support an occupying force. That the Russians have invested so much in its capture speaks volumes about their poor strategy in this war.”

“Then they say: ‘What does it mean to “break through the defense?”’ ‘Breaking through the defense’ means breaking through the defense of one house this morning, then you have to go break the defense of the next house, right?” he said.

Artyomovsk, Wagner and the Regime of Reme-Medvedev: The Prigozhin Case in the Ukraine

“Therefore the question is: “Who is going to take Artyomovsk? Which forces are in this picture? He said it would be the combined forces of the two armies. Who else? Who else is there besides Wagner?

He claims that those who did not want to fight and those who were not newcomers would be rounded up and shot. “They brought two prisoners who refused to go fight The people shot them infront of everyone, and then they buried them in the trenches that the guys had dug.

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 was no real way of doing things. The position of the adversary was the subject of an order, but no direction about how to act. We just planned how we would go about it, step by step. 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

Escape from prison and the fact that a clown is the leader of the free world. A conversation with Yukawa, a former commander of the Russian army

After crossing the Norwegian border in a daring defection, he spoke to CNN and said he escaped arrest at least ten times and dodged bullets from the Russian forces. He crossed into Norway over an icy lake using white camouflage to blend in, he said.

He told CNN that after witnessing troops being turned into cannon fodder, he did not want to go back for another tour.

He started with 10 men under his command, a number that grew as prisoners were allowed to join. “There were 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 motion. More dead bodies, more prisoners, more prisoners.

Nobody wanted to pay that kind of money. He said many Russians who died during the fighting in Ukraine were declared missing.

We have the advantage of being able to choose the guy whom the Russians call a clown. At the moment, we can see that this guy is the leader of the free world on our planet.

A Russian soldier whose friend died in battle, or Why did he drop out of the army? The case of Andriy’s Bunker

When asked if the fate of Yevgeny Nuzhin would prompt him to leave, he said he did because of his friend’s death.

Russian regulars and fighters of the private military company are providing ground forces that are squeezing the Ukrainian defenses in and around Bakhmut.

He says another group is going to claim another 30 meters. It takes a step-by-step approach to move forward while losing a lot of people.

When the first wave is exhausted, and cut down, doWagner will send more experienced fighters from the flanks in an effort to overrun Ukrainian positions.

“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. And then after some time, when he maybe bleeds out, so he just falls down.”

He believes that they are likely to have drugs in their possession, a claim that CNN has not been able to verify.

The Ukrainian defenders ran out of bullets and the attack continued, even after the first waves had ended.

The fields above Andriy’s Bunker are reverberated to almost constant shelling. The sound of outgoing weaponry is followed by a loud bang next to a few kilometers away.

Andriy says he had told the engineer: “Obviously, you know that you will be killed (in battle). You are afraid of fighting for freedom in your country.

The comparison was made between Putin and Zelensky, a time when Zelensky was the country’s leading comedian.

No matter how many fighters are sent to storm their positions, they will not resist, as promised by one of the men who joined up just days after Russia’s invasion.

“Most of my guys, they are volunteers. They had (a) good business, they had (a) good job, they had a good salary, but they came to fight for their homeland. He says that it makes a difference.

“Shook Me All Night Long”: Max and a Reconnaissing Team Clear a Russian Trench with a Black Hole

KRAMATORSK, Ukraine — Max, a Ukrainian sniper, is oiling his rifle in the early morning sunlight, listening to AC/DC’s “Shook Me All Night Long” on his cellphone.

The night before, Max and a reconnaissance team were operating in enemy territory where they cleared a trench of six Russian troops that a fellow soldier had killed with a machine gun.

Andriy, the team leader, lays out the contents of the dead men’s green backpacks on the ground, outside the Ukrainian team’s safe house in the country’s eastern Donbas region.

The soldiers who died were not more than 25 years old, according to Andriy. They have been slaves to nothing.

The Russian reserve is very large which means they are able to make mistakes. They can lose a brigade or they can lose a platoon, and some of those people are going to survive and they can share experience with the new conscripts.”

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1159671076/ukraine-war-donbas-russian-ukrainian-troops

A soldier’s army in Soledar, Ukraine: What they tell us about the enemy and how they try to convince them to drop fire

“They told us not to shoot!” We’re your people. “This is how they try to get close to us.” “Our soldiers start to think, ‘OK, it’s our camouflage, so maybe it is our people.’ “

The players share a private house. It is a mix of cozy domesticity and modern weaponry common near the front lines.

“This subculture of football hooligans, it’s a small army,” says Max, who wears a military olive-green hoodie. He has a tattoo of a fanged bat on the back of his right hand and a snake on his left. “I have a feeling that my whole life, it was preparing me for this war.”

“They’ve been told you either sit in the prison or you’ll get your freedom in the battlefield,” he says. “They are now just used as meat. They push them in waves.

“They push them forward under the threat of being shot,” Max says. The conscripts “just go until they stumble into the enemy. Then the Russians say, “Let’s drop fire there.” “

Even those that do are sometimes reluctant to use it. Max recalls a time in the Ukrainian city of Soledar — about 40 miles east of here — where his team prepared an ambush. A soldier led a group of Russian troops through town unaware that Max’s team was lying in wait about 150 feet away.

“He looked like he was walking at the front of a parade,” recalls Max, incredulous. Some of our guys did something that was stupid. They yelled at him to stop.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1159671076/ukraine-war-donbas-russian-ukrainian-troops

Zelenskyy’s fight against the Russians in Bakhmut. The defeat of Prigozhin during a Ukrainian withdrawal campaign

Ukrainian President Zelenskyycontinues to promise to push Russian soldiers entirely out of Ukrainian lands, but the view from the front line is more measured.

Max recorded a voice memo from his hospital bed about how he was shot. When I got hit by the grenade, we had to think about what to do next.

They started to hit us with multiple-grenade launchers from both sides. I crawled into the trench and they bandaged my butt. Since I was the leader of the group, I didn’t want the guys to die. I began firing back after I took the rifle.

This is the first time Max has been injured since he began fighting the Russians nine years ago. He says he doesn’t know how long it will take him to recover.

The Russians are on the verge of taking a small Ukrainian city which has been abandoned by many of its prewar population.

But a Ukrainian withdrawal does not equal disaster if carried out in an orderly way. Ryan says it should be treated as a routine tactic.

Men were moving along the street in Mariupol and other cities last year. Chechen units, militia from the self-declared Luhansk and Donetsk Republics and small numbers of Wagner operatives were rarely Russian regulars.

Prigozhin has acted unilaterally to shame the Russian military and burnish his own reputation. Wagner fighters taken prisoner by the Ukrainians told CNN they had next to no coordination with regular Russian forces, except for artillery support, as they were sent forward in their hundreds and thousands into the Ukrainian line of fire.

The Russians have become obsessed with Bakhmut in the absence of progress elsewhere. Anxious that Prigozhin was taking the bouquets while it was taking the brickbats, the Russian Defense Ministry started pouring more forces into the area.

That may explain why Ukrainian forces have been ordered to hold the line. Nazarenko said last week that the Russians took no account of their losses as they tried to take the city. The task of our forces in Bakhmut is to inflict as many losses on the enemy as possible. Ukrainian land costs hundreds of lives to the enemy.

One reason that the campaign didn’t go as well as it did was because of the lack of each in the advance toward Kyiv. Russian forces were vulnerable to ambush.

According to Rob Johnson in the US Army War College Quarterly, basic battle skills were substandard and that evidence suggests a significant lack of discipline.