Tenchu's Thoughts (Brief): The Quantity IS the Quality, Part 4.5
Last time I personally estimated that the Vagner thugs sacrificed a few thousand former prisoners in order to take Soledar:
Tenchu's Thoughts: The Quantity IS the Quality, Part 4
No word yet on how many prisoners Vagner sacrificed to win this battle. Probably a few thousand, yet Vagner reportedly has 40,000 to "spare." Just to clarify, when I refer to a "few thousand," I'm only talking about deaths. I'm not talking about injuries, which is usually 2-3x more.
Now we have an estimate from a White House official that correlates to what I predicted:
Russian Mercenaries’ Human Wave Tactics Push Back Ukrainian Troops In Soledar (msn.com)
Putin ally fighting to control salt and gypsum mines near Ukraine city of Bakhmut, says US | Russia | The Guardian
Out of its force of nearly 50,000 mercenaries, Wagner has sustained more than 4,100 deaths and 10,000 wounded, including over 1,000 killed between late November and early December near Bakhmut, the US official said on Thursday. This estimate was published by the Guardian on January 6th which was last week. It's likely that this estimate didn't include casualties sustained in late December and early January, so I can believe that Vagner suffered another 2,000 deaths during their big push into Soledar.
If you add that to the number of injuries likely sustained, which is probably around 4,000, that means Vagner lost about 15% of their force just so that Master Chef Prigozhin could sell salt to the rest of the world.
In total, it seems Vagner may have lost as much as half of their total forces. That might be an overestimate, so perhaps a quarter makes more sense.
All for what? Just to take one small mining town? Given that record, Vagner should be able to take maybe three or four more villages before they're completely dead dead dead.
Tenchusatsu |
