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‘Immoral but effective.’ How the ‘Wagner’ private military company lost 17,000 prisoners in the assault on Bakhmut (BBC News Russian, via Substack)
Some notes:
- Master Chef Prigozhin was promising that the prisoners who were recruited into Vagner would be treated "equally" as the professional thugs that were already working for the group.
- However, this was not true, as the prisoners were indeed treated as expendable meat.
- The Master Chef claimed that only half of his losses were prisoners, but an analysis of data shows that it was actually 88%.
- A total of almost 20,000 Vagner thugs died during the taking of Bakhmut, of which just over 17,000 of them were former prisoners.
- Families of these prisoner-soldiers have reported that it's hard to get confirmation on the status of these dead guys, which means many of them probably haven't been paid their 5M rubles (approx. $60K USD).
- Given that Vagner recruited a total of 50K prisoners, that means approximately 1/3 of them died.
- Often the wounded-to-killed ratio can be on the order of 4:1, but in the case of the Vagner prisoners, that ratio is already blown out of the water.
- I suspect there was a 2:1 wounded-to-killed ratio among prisoner thugs, and that's being VERY generous to Vagner and their meat grinder tactics. In other words, VERY few prisoners survived Bakhmut unscathed.
- However, the "immoral but effective" part of their tactics was the fact that the "expendables" did cause a significant amount of Ukrainian casualties. Even if the ratio of dead Vagner thugs to dead Ukrainian soldiers is somewhere around 5:1 or even 7:1, each dead Ukrainian soldier represents a life value and a wealth of experience that got lost. In comparison, each dead Vagner thug represents a life that no one gives a shit about.
Tenchusatsu |
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