The commander, who uses the code name Duke, said Wagner used untrained prisoners in the first line of attack and then, after one or two hours, as the Ukrainian troops were tiring, sent special forces into the fray, attacking from the flanks. “It was very good tactics,” Duke said.
The Kill Box
But Ukraine has been able to use Bakhmut as a kill box to grind down the vast numbers of newly mobilized Russian soldiers who were introduced to the battlefield late last year, he said. Even Wagner’s forces are said to have been worn down since the summer.
“We broke their backbone; we killed all their military staff,” Major Pantsyrny said.
He said that only a few professional soldiers seemed to be left to direct thousands of convicts who had been recruited to fill the ranks, and that the losses showed: “They try something, but the results are not the same anymore.”
Russian troops have, nevertheless, been advancing, thanks to their greater numbers, bolstered by tens of thousands of raw recruits and through sheer brute force. They sometimes demolish whole residential blocks to defeat a single sniper, according to one unit of soldiers.
But Russian casualties, especially among Wagner, have been enormous, and the more confident Ukrainian commanders insist that the Russians have little fight left. “Russia is attacking on its last legs,” said Oleksandr, the company commander.
Ukrainian casualties have been relentless, too, and there is a shortage of volunteers in places on the front lines, Duke said. In November, he was given an urgent order “to gather all the people of our unit, cooks, drivers, press officer, photographer, all staff, take rifles and go to the Bakhmut area.”
By the end of February, they had rotated out with 50 percent of the men wounded, he said, some depressed and apathetic.
