Russia & Ukraine
- Thread starter UsualName
- Start date
It might be that you're considering of becoming nr. 61.
Just saying~
@Master Pu will be your squad weapons/self defense instructor.
Your wreckless accusations are baseless as they are just plain stupid, nancy.
You are the one supporting a non-defensive war, not I, sweetheart.
You wanna serve, then go sign up yourself you tough little thing, lol.
While you got your little quill out, what are you suggesting is worth your life to fight for in Ukraine?
Man it's gonna be cool.
Free shovels, - bows & arrows,
drone practice, vodka, drugs & russian thugs.
C'mon easy.
It's easy money.
You are quite the empty paper bag on this one, doris, lol.
Scratch the surface and there's ... empty.
So you wanna fight for what ...
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/02/14/europe/russian-army-prisoners-conscripts-ukraine-intl/index.html
Exclusive: Russian convicts say defense ministry is sending them from jail to fight as ‘cannon fodder’ in Ukraine
By Nick Paton Walsh, Darya Tarasova and Jo Shelley, CNN
Published 3:47 AM EST, Tue February 14, 2023
04:37 - Source: CNN
CNN —
“I am being taken to be shot. I lost a lot of people there. Remember this: do not send more people here. It’s enough, they want to kill us all.”
It is the last message Viktor Sevalnev would send. A convict, who had been in jail for armed robbery and assault, he was sent from prison to fight for Russia in Ukraine. After most of his colleagues died in an assault on a factory outside Soledar, it was the act of survival that proved fatal to Sevalnev.
In a last message to his wife, he said he feared officials from the Russian Ministry of Defense would soon take him from his hospital bed, where he recorded the audio message, and execute him. Days later, his body was returned to his wife in Moscow, in a closed coffin.
Sevalnev’s callous fate joins a growing list of complaints of abuse from convicts whom CNN has spoken to. For months, Russia has been using the shadowy private mercenary company Wagner to bolster its frontline presence with prisoners – a scheme at first denied and secretive, but then openly promoted by Wagner’s owner, Yevgeny Prigozhin.
On Thursday, Prigozhin announced that Wagner had stopped recruiting convicts to fight in Ukraine, saying “those who work for us now are fulfilling all their obligations.” No reason was given for the decision and CNN cannot independently confirm the claims.
However, Sevalnev and several prisoners CNN has spoken to seem to indicate a disturbing new strategy. They say they were directly employed by the Russian Ministry of Defense.
A Ukrainian intelligence official confirmed to CNN that prisoners recently captured by Ukrainian forces had said they were directly employed by the ministry.
“They emphasize to us that they are not Wagner, that they were invited officially by the defense ministry,” Andriy Usov, representative for defense intelligence, at the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, told CNN.
Usov said the development had “echoes of internal squabbling among the Russian military leadership,” and that the Russian defense hierarchy, defense minister Sergei Shoigu and the new head of the Ukraine operation, Valery Gerasimov, were creating a convict resource they could directly control through the ministry’s own private companies. Usov said the ministry had fewer convicts for now but they “will be used in the same way … as cannon fodder,” as Wagner does.
Vladimir Osechkin, from prisoner rights group Gulagu.net, said the Ministry of Defense appeared to be luring recruits and convicts from Wagner using “more favorable terms” as a check on the rising clout of its owner, Prigozhin, increasingly seen as a competitor to parts of the armed forces.
“Many in Moscow are really afraid of Prigozhin,” said Osechkin. “They understand that he commands a huge gang – an organized criminal group of mercenaries and killers – who at any moment can arrange the god knows what in Moscow.”
CNN has asked the Russian Ministry of Defense for comment and received no reply.
CNN spoke to several prisoners who worked for a unit known by its number “08807” – who all say they were employed directly by the Russian Ministry of Defense. Some held documents suggesting they were ultimately deployed to an element of the Luhansk separatist army, which has been suborned into the Russian defense ministry. The unit 08807 was deployed in October to the frontlines around Soledar, known as a “Shtrum” brigade – for storming Ukrainian lines – and suffered catastrophic casualties.
Grainy footage obtained by Gulagu.net shows Sevalnev and his unit celebrating pre-deployment by dancing at a camp inside of Luhansk. It also shows them eating and joking just behind the frontlines the night before they began an assault on a key factory in Soledar, which would prove fatal for the majority of Sevalnev’s unit, survivors said.
The convicts spoke of casual mistreatment on and off the battlefield, but Sevalnev’s fate stood out. According to a recording of a call to his wife from a Russian separatist official who arranged the body’s repatriation, his abrupt death was apparently caused by shrapnel injuries.
Sevalnev’s wife declined to be interviewed for this report, but his audio messages and images of him from the war were supplied to CNN by Gulagu.net. Russian court documents obtained by CNN show Sevalnev was convicted for theft, and should, according to his sentencing, have been in jail when he died. His grave is located outside Moscow, and records his month of death as November 2022.
Three other survivors of the unit spoke to CNN from hospital. One, also a prisoner, said Sevalnev had been wounded once but sent back to fight on the frontline, where he was then wounded again.
Sevalnev's case and several prisoners that CNN spoke to appear to suggest a disturbing new strategy used by Russia's Ministry of Defense.
“No one is being operated on here, no surgeries performed on anyone,” he said. CNN is withholding his name and those of the other surviving convicts for their safety. “People walk around [the hospital] with bullet wounds, with shrapnel stuck in their legs.”
A former soldier before his imprisonment, he also described catastrophic losses. “Our batch was 130 people, but we also have many amputees, and we probably have 40 people left”, he added, saying many different groups of prisoners were added to their unit over time. He said his unit had only 15 survivors and that the 08807 was now called 40321, or “Storm unit.” “In short, the meat grinder,” he added. He told CNN in the past few days he had been sent back to the frontline, his injuries unhealed.
A second prisoner, himself a veteran of previous Russian conflicts, said he was employed by the Russian Ministry of Defense last year, a decade into his sentence for murder, after being overlooked initially when Wagner recruited from his prison. He described himself as a “patriot” and complained many of the prisoners sent to the front were “green.”
“I don’t have any complaints, war is war. Some come here, hear the machine gun, and run. It’s not good. They set everyone else up, as no one has my back,” he said. This soldier was wounded severely in the leg in October, after 25 days on the front, but described how he felt no fear. “In the trench, 2-6 meters from me a shell lands, soil falls down to the trench, but I don’t feel any fear at all. I don’t know why it happens like this with me.”
A third said he was serving a sentence for manslaughter when he was directly recruited by the defense ministry. He bemoaned how their convicts did not get the medical treatment or benefits that Wagner boasted it lavishes on its recruits. [Wagner recruits have also complained of being used as cannon fodder and poorly treated.] He described how one battle left half his unit as casualties. “We were sent to the very front. I radioed at our guys that they were firing mortars at us, that they should aim a bit to the right. And still they shot at us from both sides. Then I understood they were deliberately firing at us.”
The fate of convicts employed by Wagner appears no better, according to relatives of three convicts over the summer who appeared in an August CNN report.
One had disappeared without trace for four months, according to his brother. Another had fallen silent too, but was sending his brother his salary, collected monthly from a rented office in a sealed plastic bag. A third had appeared in a video with Prigozhin, portrayed as a lucky returnee. Yet a friend described his “zombie-like” appearance, heavy drinking and urgent desire to return to the front.
The scheme to send convicts to the war appears to have grown fast, with figures obtained by CNN from Russia’s penal system showing a 27,000 drop in the prison population between March and November last year, when the scheme was just three months old.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has also elaborated on the legality of the pardons that Wagner has insisted convicts are given, telling reporters last month any presidential decrees pardoning prisoners were likely classified. “There are open decrees and there are decrees with various classifications of secrecy,” he said. “That is precisely why I cannot say anything about these decrees. I can really confirm that the entire procedure for pardoning prisoners is carried out in strict accordance with Russian law.”
Wagner’s recruitment has also snared prisoners who are not Russian, and may not have been convicted of a crime. Tanzanian student Nemes Tarimo was on an exchange in Moscow when he was apparently arrested on drugs charges and held on remand. He was convicted in March last year to seven years in jail, according to the Tanzanian foreign ministry, citing information from their Russian counterparts.
Makrene Kigoga told CNN that Tarimo's family didn't know anything about his whereabouts until they were informed of his death.
His family in Tanzania told CNN they heard nothing of his fate until they were contacted by officials to say he had died.
Wagner released a ghoulish video of a memorial ceremony in Tarimo’s honor at a graveyard in Molkino, western Russia, saying he died in October near Bakhmut. His body was returned to Tanzania last month, according to state TV, with the foreign ministry saying in a statement that Tarimo had accepted an offer to fight in return for money and his freedom.
His cousin Rehema Makrene Kigoga told CNN: “Since his childhood, Nemes was a very obedient boy. He wasn’t a scamp, but was a very religious person.” She also said they had heard nothing about his recruitment until after his death. “When he was alive, we never heard about this report but now that he’s died we are told he was arrested for drug-related offenses. It gives a lot of sorrow and sadness as a family. He never even had a dream of becoming a soldier.”
Sammy Awami, Josh Pennington and CNN’s Bethlehem Feleke, Victoria Butenko and Alex Stambaugh contributed to this report.
Exclusive: Russian convicts say defense ministry is sending them from jail to fight as ‘cannon fodder’ in Ukraine
By Nick Paton Walsh, Darya Tarasova and Jo Shelley, CNN
Published 3:47 AM EST, Tue February 14, 2023
04:37 - Source: CNN
CNN —
“I am being taken to be shot. I lost a lot of people there. Remember this: do not send more people here. It’s enough, they want to kill us all.”
It is the last message Viktor Sevalnev would send. A convict, who had been in jail for armed robbery and assault, he was sent from prison to fight for Russia in Ukraine. After most of his colleagues died in an assault on a factory outside Soledar, it was the act of survival that proved fatal to Sevalnev.
In a last message to his wife, he said he feared officials from the Russian Ministry of Defense would soon take him from his hospital bed, where he recorded the audio message, and execute him. Days later, his body was returned to his wife in Moscow, in a closed coffin.
Sevalnev’s callous fate joins a growing list of complaints of abuse from convicts whom CNN has spoken to. For months, Russia has been using the shadowy private mercenary company Wagner to bolster its frontline presence with prisoners – a scheme at first denied and secretive, but then openly promoted by Wagner’s owner, Yevgeny Prigozhin.
On Thursday, Prigozhin announced that Wagner had stopped recruiting convicts to fight in Ukraine, saying “those who work for us now are fulfilling all their obligations.” No reason was given for the decision and CNN cannot independently confirm the claims.
However, Sevalnev and several prisoners CNN has spoken to seem to indicate a disturbing new strategy. They say they were directly employed by the Russian Ministry of Defense.
A Ukrainian intelligence official confirmed to CNN that prisoners recently captured by Ukrainian forces had said they were directly employed by the ministry.
“They emphasize to us that they are not Wagner, that they were invited officially by the defense ministry,” Andriy Usov, representative for defense intelligence, at the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, told CNN.
Usov said the development had “echoes of internal squabbling among the Russian military leadership,” and that the Russian defense hierarchy, defense minister Sergei Shoigu and the new head of the Ukraine operation, Valery Gerasimov, were creating a convict resource they could directly control through the ministry’s own private companies. Usov said the ministry had fewer convicts for now but they “will be used in the same way … as cannon fodder,” as Wagner does.
Vladimir Osechkin, from prisoner rights group Gulagu.net, said the Ministry of Defense appeared to be luring recruits and convicts from Wagner using “more favorable terms” as a check on the rising clout of its owner, Prigozhin, increasingly seen as a competitor to parts of the armed forces.
“Many in Moscow are really afraid of Prigozhin,” said Osechkin. “They understand that he commands a huge gang – an organized criminal group of mercenaries and killers – who at any moment can arrange the god knows what in Moscow.”
CNN has asked the Russian Ministry of Defense for comment and received no reply.
CNN spoke to several prisoners who worked for a unit known by its number “08807” – who all say they were employed directly by the Russian Ministry of Defense. Some held documents suggesting they were ultimately deployed to an element of the Luhansk separatist army, which has been suborned into the Russian defense ministry. The unit 08807 was deployed in October to the frontlines around Soledar, known as a “Shtrum” brigade – for storming Ukrainian lines – and suffered catastrophic casualties.
Grainy footage obtained by Gulagu.net shows Sevalnev and his unit celebrating pre-deployment by dancing at a camp inside of Luhansk. It also shows them eating and joking just behind the frontlines the night before they began an assault on a key factory in Soledar, which would prove fatal for the majority of Sevalnev’s unit, survivors said.
The convicts spoke of casual mistreatment on and off the battlefield, but Sevalnev’s fate stood out. According to a recording of a call to his wife from a Russian separatist official who arranged the body’s repatriation, his abrupt death was apparently caused by shrapnel injuries.
Sevalnev’s wife declined to be interviewed for this report, but his audio messages and images of him from the war were supplied to CNN by Gulagu.net. Russian court documents obtained by CNN show Sevalnev was convicted for theft, and should, according to his sentencing, have been in jail when he died. His grave is located outside Moscow, and records his month of death as November 2022.
Three other survivors of the unit spoke to CNN from hospital. One, also a prisoner, said Sevalnev had been wounded once but sent back to fight on the frontline, where he was then wounded again.
Sevalnev's case and several prisoners that CNN spoke to appear to suggest a disturbing new strategy used by Russia's Ministry of Defense.
“No one is being operated on here, no surgeries performed on anyone,” he said. CNN is withholding his name and those of the other surviving convicts for their safety. “People walk around [the hospital] with bullet wounds, with shrapnel stuck in their legs.”
A former soldier before his imprisonment, he also described catastrophic losses. “Our batch was 130 people, but we also have many amputees, and we probably have 40 people left”, he added, saying many different groups of prisoners were added to their unit over time. He said his unit had only 15 survivors and that the 08807 was now called 40321, or “Storm unit.” “In short, the meat grinder,” he added. He told CNN in the past few days he had been sent back to the frontline, his injuries unhealed.
A second prisoner, himself a veteran of previous Russian conflicts, said he was employed by the Russian Ministry of Defense last year, a decade into his sentence for murder, after being overlooked initially when Wagner recruited from his prison. He described himself as a “patriot” and complained many of the prisoners sent to the front were “green.”
“I don’t have any complaints, war is war. Some come here, hear the machine gun, and run. It’s not good. They set everyone else up, as no one has my back,” he said. This soldier was wounded severely in the leg in October, after 25 days on the front, but described how he felt no fear. “In the trench, 2-6 meters from me a shell lands, soil falls down to the trench, but I don’t feel any fear at all. I don’t know why it happens like this with me.”
A third said he was serving a sentence for manslaughter when he was directly recruited by the defense ministry. He bemoaned how their convicts did not get the medical treatment or benefits that Wagner boasted it lavishes on its recruits. [Wagner recruits have also complained of being used as cannon fodder and poorly treated.] He described how one battle left half his unit as casualties. “We were sent to the very front. I radioed at our guys that they were firing mortars at us, that they should aim a bit to the right. And still they shot at us from both sides. Then I understood they were deliberately firing at us.”
The fate of convicts employed by Wagner appears no better, according to relatives of three convicts over the summer who appeared in an August CNN report.
One had disappeared without trace for four months, according to his brother. Another had fallen silent too, but was sending his brother his salary, collected monthly from a rented office in a sealed plastic bag. A third had appeared in a video with Prigozhin, portrayed as a lucky returnee. Yet a friend described his “zombie-like” appearance, heavy drinking and urgent desire to return to the front.
The scheme to send convicts to the war appears to have grown fast, with figures obtained by CNN from Russia’s penal system showing a 27,000 drop in the prison population between March and November last year, when the scheme was just three months old.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has also elaborated on the legality of the pardons that Wagner has insisted convicts are given, telling reporters last month any presidential decrees pardoning prisoners were likely classified. “There are open decrees and there are decrees with various classifications of secrecy,” he said. “That is precisely why I cannot say anything about these decrees. I can really confirm that the entire procedure for pardoning prisoners is carried out in strict accordance with Russian law.”
Wagner’s recruitment has also snared prisoners who are not Russian, and may not have been convicted of a crime. Tanzanian student Nemes Tarimo was on an exchange in Moscow when he was apparently arrested on drugs charges and held on remand. He was convicted in March last year to seven years in jail, according to the Tanzanian foreign ministry, citing information from their Russian counterparts.
Makrene Kigoga told CNN that Tarimo's family didn't know anything about his whereabouts until they were informed of his death.
His family in Tanzania told CNN they heard nothing of his fate until they were contacted by officials to say he had died.
Wagner released a ghoulish video of a memorial ceremony in Tarimo’s honor at a graveyard in Molkino, western Russia, saying he died in October near Bakhmut. His body was returned to Tanzania last month, according to state TV, with the foreign ministry saying in a statement that Tarimo had accepted an offer to fight in return for money and his freedom.
His cousin Rehema Makrene Kigoga told CNN: “Since his childhood, Nemes was a very obedient boy. He wasn’t a scamp, but was a very religious person.” She also said they had heard nothing about his recruitment until after his death. “When he was alive, we never heard about this report but now that he’s died we are told he was arrested for drug-related offenses. It gives a lot of sorrow and sadness as a family. He never even had a dream of becoming a soldier.”
Sammy Awami, Josh Pennington and CNN’s Bethlehem Feleke, Victoria Butenko and Alex Stambaugh contributed to this report.
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/02/13/europe/russia-ukraine-vuhledar-donetsk-fiasco-intl/index.html
‘Like turkeys at a shooting range’: Mauling of Russian forces in Donetsk hotspot may signal problems to come
By Tim Lister, CNN
Updated 3:47 AM EST, Tue February 14, 2023
Kyiv, Ukraine CNN —
The scenes are chaotic: Russian tanks veering wildly before exploding or driving straight into minefields, men running in every direction, some on fire, the bodies of soldiers caught in tank tracks.
Russian military bloggers are calling it a fiasco, and worse.
These scenes have been recorded by Ukrainian military drones over the past two weeks around the town of Vuhledar in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine, where successive Russian assaults have failed.
The Vuhledar debacle suggests chronic failures in the command and tactics of the Russians as they gear up for a spring offensive. If replicated elsewhere on the long military front in Donetsk and Luhansk, such failings could jeopardize the Kremlin’s plans to seize more territory.
About 20 videos geolocated by CNN show basic tactical blunders in an area that’s open and flat, where Ukrainian spotters on higher ground can direct artillery strikes and where minefields are worsening Russian casualties.
One video shows a tank running into a minefield and exploding, followed almost obliviously by an infantry fighting vehicle that suffers the same fate. Others show Ukrainian drones dropping small explosive charges on static tanks in open country – and a graveyard of abandoned armor.
At least two dozen Russian tanks and infantry vehicles have been disabled or destroyed in a matter of days, according to the videos, which were released by the Ukrainian military and analyzed by CNN and military experts. Satellite images show intensive patterns of impacts along tree lines where Russian tanks tried to advance.
The Russian Defense Ministry has insisted the assault on Vuhledar, where the 155th Marine Brigade is prominently involved, is going according to plan. In remarks recorded for a Sunday television show, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the “marine infantry is working as it should. Right now. Fighting heroically.”
But the leader of the self-declared, Russian-backed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), Denis Pushilin, acknowledged Friday that the area was “hot” and said “the enemy continues to transfer reserves in large quantities, and this slowed down the liberation of this settlement.”
Vuhledar was built for the nearby coal mine (the name translates as “gift of coal”) and sits above surrounding plains. Its high-rise buildings give its defenders – principally the Ukrainian 72nd Mechanized – a significant advantage, as well as hardened underground cover.
Military historian Tom Cooper, who has studied the battle for Vuhledar, describes it as “a big, tall fortress in the middle of an empty, flat desert.”
The town has become a lynchpin in the conflict in eastern Ukraine. Russian forces have been trying to take it for three months. Victory for Moscow here would make it harder for the Ukrainians to shut down a nearby railroad that links Donetsk with Russian-occupied Crimea and allow the Russians to begin a northern “hook” as part of their anticipated spring offensive.
A previously ill-conceived plan in November to take Vuhledar led to heavy casualties and a near mutiny among men of the 155th Marine Brigade.
Critics of Russia’s military high command say the handling of the latest offensive is worse still, with one military blogger describing it as a “shameful debacle.”
Cooper says the Russians built a formidable force around Vuhledar, “say, a total of about 20,000 troops, 90 MBTs [main battle tanks], perhaps two times as many IFVs [infantry fighting vehicles], and about 100 artillery pieces.”
But attacks launched in the last week of January were fatally flawed, he said. “They were advancing along a relatively narrow route, all the time in sight of Ukrainian observers posted atop of high buildings in Vuhledar, and now facing about 500 meters of empty terrain on the eastern side of the town,” Cooper wrote on his blog.
“Ukrainian artillery not only caused heavy losses to the advancing units but hit their rear too – cutting off both their supply links and their possible withdrawal routes.”
‘Only morons attack head-on’
A number of prominent Russian military bloggers have been unrestrained in their criticism of the Vuhledar offensive.
“They were shot like turkeys at a shooting range,” said former DPR Defense Minister Igor Strelkov, who has become a strident critic of the campaign.
Strelkov, also known as Igor Girkin, added on Telegram that “a lot of good T-72B3/T-80BVM tanks and the best paratroopers and marines were liquidated.”
In another post on Telegram, Strelkov wrote: “Only morons attack head-on in the same place, heavily fortified and extremely inconvenient for the attackers for many months in a row.”
Russia’s military bloggers have tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of subscribers to their Telegram channels. They have been highly critical of previous episodes in the campaign.
One of them – Moscow Calling – said at the weekend that the movement of tanks and infantry fighting vehicles in “slender columns” near Vuhledar was asking for trouble. He alleged that Russian units in the area lack information because commanders have failed to integrate intelligence-gathering into battlefield decisions.
By contrast, he said: “All this has been implemented or is in the process of being implemented by the Ukrainian armed forces.”
Moscow Calling asserted that older T-72 tanks deployed in Vuhledar lack upgrades that would improve the driver’s breadth of vision. That may help explain several instances in which Russian tanks seemed to get entangled or reverse blindly.
“How are blind, deaf tanks, armored personnel carriers, with equally blind, deaf infantry supposed to fight without columns? And then how to coordinate any actions if there is no communication and situational awareness?” he wrote.
“If the Russian Armed Forces try to disperse, they will shoot each other, because they do not understand who is in front of them.”
Several Russian commentators have called for the dismissal of Lieutenant General Rustam Muradov, the commander of the Eastern Grouping of Forces. Muradov was in charge in November when men of the 155th protested that his tactics had caused disastrous losses.
Another blogger said that Russian forces were doomed to repeat their mistakes if such commanders remained in place.
In an expletive-laden post, the pro-Wagner Telegram channel Grey Zone said of Muradov: “This coward is lying down at the control point and sending column after column until the commander of one of the brigades involved in the Vuhledar assault is dead on the contact line.”
The commander killed was a special forces colonel, Sergey Polyakov, according to unofficial Russian sources.
Another Russian blog with more than 500,000 followers said of Muradov’s team: “These people killed a significant number of personnel and equipment [in November] and did not bear any responsibility. After which, with the same mediocrity, they began to storm Ugledar [Vuhledar]. Impunity always breeds permissiveness.”
Questions over troop training
But the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW) says that poor leadership is only part of the problem: the “highly dysfunctional tactics are far more indicative of the fact that the 155th Naval Infantry Brigade is likely comprised of poorly trained mobilized personnel than of poor command.”
The UK defense ministry reported Sunday that an uptick in Russian casualties in places like Vuhledar “is likely due to a range of factors including lack of trained personnel, coordination, and resources across the front.”
Ukrainian military officials say there is a random mix of Russian forces in the Vuhledar area, including professional units, the recently mobilized, militia of the DPR and infantry of a private military company called Patriot, which is said to be close to the Russian defense ministry.
The setbacks around Vuhledar don’t bode well for a broader Russian offensive. ISW assesses that they “have likely further weakened the Russian ultranationalist community’s belief that Russian forces are able to launch a decisive offensive operation.”
However, some Ukrainian units have been running short of munitions as the tempo of Russian operations has increased.
“The key to success on the battlefield is effective fire damage, which requires an appropriate amount of weapons and ammunition,” said the commander of Ukrainian forces Valeriy Zaluzhnyi on Saturday.
Analysts say the challenge for the Ukrainians is to resupply frontline units with shells and anti-tank missiles fast enough.
Russian forces continue to have a distinct advantage in firepower. On Saturday they launched a barrage of thermobaric missiles at Vuhledar, a reminder that they are more capable of inflicting destruction than taking territory.
‘Like turkeys at a shooting range’: Mauling of Russian forces in Donetsk hotspot may signal problems to come
By Tim Lister, CNN
Updated 3:47 AM EST, Tue February 14, 2023
Kyiv, Ukraine CNN —
The scenes are chaotic: Russian tanks veering wildly before exploding or driving straight into minefields, men running in every direction, some on fire, the bodies of soldiers caught in tank tracks.
Russian military bloggers are calling it a fiasco, and worse.
These scenes have been recorded by Ukrainian military drones over the past two weeks around the town of Vuhledar in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine, where successive Russian assaults have failed.
The Vuhledar debacle suggests chronic failures in the command and tactics of the Russians as they gear up for a spring offensive. If replicated elsewhere on the long military front in Donetsk and Luhansk, such failings could jeopardize the Kremlin’s plans to seize more territory.
About 20 videos geolocated by CNN show basic tactical blunders in an area that’s open and flat, where Ukrainian spotters on higher ground can direct artillery strikes and where minefields are worsening Russian casualties.
One video shows a tank running into a minefield and exploding, followed almost obliviously by an infantry fighting vehicle that suffers the same fate. Others show Ukrainian drones dropping small explosive charges on static tanks in open country – and a graveyard of abandoned armor.
At least two dozen Russian tanks and infantry vehicles have been disabled or destroyed in a matter of days, according to the videos, which were released by the Ukrainian military and analyzed by CNN and military experts. Satellite images show intensive patterns of impacts along tree lines where Russian tanks tried to advance.
The Russian Defense Ministry has insisted the assault on Vuhledar, where the 155th Marine Brigade is prominently involved, is going according to plan. In remarks recorded for a Sunday television show, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the “marine infantry is working as it should. Right now. Fighting heroically.”
But the leader of the self-declared, Russian-backed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), Denis Pushilin, acknowledged Friday that the area was “hot” and said “the enemy continues to transfer reserves in large quantities, and this slowed down the liberation of this settlement.”
Vuhledar was built for the nearby coal mine (the name translates as “gift of coal”) and sits above surrounding plains. Its high-rise buildings give its defenders – principally the Ukrainian 72nd Mechanized – a significant advantage, as well as hardened underground cover.
Military historian Tom Cooper, who has studied the battle for Vuhledar, describes it as “a big, tall fortress in the middle of an empty, flat desert.”
The town has become a lynchpin in the conflict in eastern Ukraine. Russian forces have been trying to take it for three months. Victory for Moscow here would make it harder for the Ukrainians to shut down a nearby railroad that links Donetsk with Russian-occupied Crimea and allow the Russians to begin a northern “hook” as part of their anticipated spring offensive.
A previously ill-conceived plan in November to take Vuhledar led to heavy casualties and a near mutiny among men of the 155th Marine Brigade.
Critics of Russia’s military high command say the handling of the latest offensive is worse still, with one military blogger describing it as a “shameful debacle.”
Cooper says the Russians built a formidable force around Vuhledar, “say, a total of about 20,000 troops, 90 MBTs [main battle tanks], perhaps two times as many IFVs [infantry fighting vehicles], and about 100 artillery pieces.”
But attacks launched in the last week of January were fatally flawed, he said. “They were advancing along a relatively narrow route, all the time in sight of Ukrainian observers posted atop of high buildings in Vuhledar, and now facing about 500 meters of empty terrain on the eastern side of the town,” Cooper wrote on his blog.
“Ukrainian artillery not only caused heavy losses to the advancing units but hit their rear too – cutting off both their supply links and their possible withdrawal routes.”
‘Only morons attack head-on’
A number of prominent Russian military bloggers have been unrestrained in their criticism of the Vuhledar offensive.
“They were shot like turkeys at a shooting range,” said former DPR Defense Minister Igor Strelkov, who has become a strident critic of the campaign.
Strelkov, also known as Igor Girkin, added on Telegram that “a lot of good T-72B3/T-80BVM tanks and the best paratroopers and marines were liquidated.”
In another post on Telegram, Strelkov wrote: “Only morons attack head-on in the same place, heavily fortified and extremely inconvenient for the attackers for many months in a row.”
Russia’s military bloggers have tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of subscribers to their Telegram channels. They have been highly critical of previous episodes in the campaign.
One of them – Moscow Calling – said at the weekend that the movement of tanks and infantry fighting vehicles in “slender columns” near Vuhledar was asking for trouble. He alleged that Russian units in the area lack information because commanders have failed to integrate intelligence-gathering into battlefield decisions.
By contrast, he said: “All this has been implemented or is in the process of being implemented by the Ukrainian armed forces.”
Moscow Calling asserted that older T-72 tanks deployed in Vuhledar lack upgrades that would improve the driver’s breadth of vision. That may help explain several instances in which Russian tanks seemed to get entangled or reverse blindly.
“How are blind, deaf tanks, armored personnel carriers, with equally blind, deaf infantry supposed to fight without columns? And then how to coordinate any actions if there is no communication and situational awareness?” he wrote.
“If the Russian Armed Forces try to disperse, they will shoot each other, because they do not understand who is in front of them.”
Several Russian commentators have called for the dismissal of Lieutenant General Rustam Muradov, the commander of the Eastern Grouping of Forces. Muradov was in charge in November when men of the 155th protested that his tactics had caused disastrous losses.
Another blogger said that Russian forces were doomed to repeat their mistakes if such commanders remained in place.
In an expletive-laden post, the pro-Wagner Telegram channel Grey Zone said of Muradov: “This coward is lying down at the control point and sending column after column until the commander of one of the brigades involved in the Vuhledar assault is dead on the contact line.”
The commander killed was a special forces colonel, Sergey Polyakov, according to unofficial Russian sources.
Another Russian blog with more than 500,000 followers said of Muradov’s team: “These people killed a significant number of personnel and equipment [in November] and did not bear any responsibility. After which, with the same mediocrity, they began to storm Ugledar [Vuhledar]. Impunity always breeds permissiveness.”
Questions over troop training
But the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW) says that poor leadership is only part of the problem: the “highly dysfunctional tactics are far more indicative of the fact that the 155th Naval Infantry Brigade is likely comprised of poorly trained mobilized personnel than of poor command.”
The UK defense ministry reported Sunday that an uptick in Russian casualties in places like Vuhledar “is likely due to a range of factors including lack of trained personnel, coordination, and resources across the front.”
Ukrainian military officials say there is a random mix of Russian forces in the Vuhledar area, including professional units, the recently mobilized, militia of the DPR and infantry of a private military company called Patriot, which is said to be close to the Russian defense ministry.
The setbacks around Vuhledar don’t bode well for a broader Russian offensive. ISW assesses that they “have likely further weakened the Russian ultranationalist community’s belief that Russian forces are able to launch a decisive offensive operation.”
However, some Ukrainian units have been running short of munitions as the tempo of Russian operations has increased.
“The key to success on the battlefield is effective fire damage, which requires an appropriate amount of weapons and ammunition,” said the commander of Ukrainian forces Valeriy Zaluzhnyi on Saturday.
Analysts say the challenge for the Ukrainians is to resupply frontline units with shells and anti-tank missiles fast enough.
Russian forces continue to have a distinct advantage in firepower. On Saturday they launched a barrage of thermobaric missiles at Vuhledar, a reminder that they are more capable of inflicting destruction than taking territory.
So The US MIC made Russia invade and attempt genocide on The Ukrainian people? Got it.
Hopefully.