CHASIV YAR, Ukraine — Shielded by a small hill from Russian positions half a mile away, a Ukrainian soldier was spotted by drone feeding a new foxhole that appeared overnight northwest of the contested town of Bakhmut.
Three soldiers from the Russian paramilitary organization Wagner had crawled through no man’s land to set up a firing position, likely for a grenade launcher. The drone’s camera zoomed in on Russian trenches beyond.
“Bodies, corpses, corpses on top of each other,” said Oleksiy, a soldier with Ukraine’s Third Assault Brigade, who viewed the footage and coordinated the response. “And now, see, those brave boys got in our way.”
“They don’t even have their body armor on,” he called to a comrade operating a US-made MK-19 grenade launcher over a staccato of machine gun fire. One of the bullets whizzed past them. “Let’s hit them now.”
With a series of clangs, a volley of shells flew into the Russian trench. “Done,” said Oleksiy.
These Wagner men, too, join a long list of casualties suffered by the group, now largely based on convicts recruited from Russian prisons, in the months-long struggle over Bakhmut.
Ukraine has suffered a high casualty toll in the battle for Bakhmut, which could hamper its ability to launch a spring offensive.
A Ukrainian soldier from the Third Assault Brigade fired an MK-19 grenade launcher at a Russian foxhole near Bakhmut last week.
With their policy of executing soldiers who attempt to retreat or surrender on the spot, and a disregard for casualties shocking for modern warfare, Wagner’s available penal battalions have become a unique threat to Ukrainian defenders, leading to the Time advance when the regular Russian military remains largely stalled.
No military in a democratic society can send wave after wave of soldiers to near certain death to gain a few hundred yards. Even Russia’s regular armed forces, known for their high tolerance for casualties, are reluctant to send troops on clearly suicidal missions. Yet precisely such an approach has allowed Wagner to come close to capturing Bakhmut, at a cost that Ukrainian and Western officials estimate at tens of thousands of Russian casualties.
Ukraine is also suffering heavy casualties here, which could hamper its ability to launch a spring offensive with new weapons supplied by the US and its allies. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is under mounting pressure to withdraw from the eastern city, which was home to 70,000 people before the war, in what would be Kiev’s first significant withdrawal since last summer. Wagner, who began his assault on Bakhmut in July, is closing in on the remaining two supply roads into the shrinking salient as his men fight house-to-house to approach the city’s central quarters.
Ukraine has deployed some of its best brigades to defend the besieged city of Bakhmut in recent months.
Photo: Manu Brabo for The Wall Street Journal
A Ukrainian soldier took cover in a basement at the front near Bakhmut in March.
As many as 18 human waves from Wagner troops have at times attacked a single trench in 24 hours, Sr. Lt. Petro Horbatenko, battalion commander of the Third Assault Brigade, one of the Ukrainian units on the Bakhmut Front.
“A Wagner fighter has no way of retreating. Your only chance of survival is to keep moving forward,” he said. “And this tactic works. It’s a zombie war… They throw cannon fodder at us for maximum damage. Of course we can’t react like that because we don’t have that much staff and we are sensitive to losses.
One of Wagner’s men captured on the Bakhmut front, a 48-year-old recidivist with convictions for murder, robbery and drug offenses, said he spent three weeks training in one essential skill: how to crawl in a forest and moves on indicating that he should not survive his first mission. Then, on the night of January 29, two Wagner squads, each consisting of five regular convicts and a commander, also an inmate, were ordered to attack a fortified Ukrainian outpost.
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“Two machine guns fired at us, people were torn to pieces, but they kept telling us: crawl on and dig in. It was just stupid,” the man captured by Ukrainian forces in March told an interview.
Four of the 12 members of that assault group remained combat-capable by the end of the night, with most of the others killed, he said. The Wagner fighter said he was allowed to withdraw until morning due to injuries to his arm. Even for the badly wounded soldiers, withdrawing without permission was not an option.
“If you don’t go ahead and do as you’re told, you’ll just be nullified,” he said, using Wagner’s term for on-the-spot executions, often with a sledgehammer blow to the head. “Everyone knows that.”
At a hospital in Russian-occupied Luhansk, a Wagner doctor declared the man fit for service after noting that he could still move his trigger finger. He was sent back to the front line northwest of Bakhmut in late February to evacuate casualties. The number of dead Wagner men he saw in the nine days before his capture numbered in the hundreds, with more fatalities than non-fatal victims, he said. “We would just pile all the bodies in one place and leave them there, there was no time to attend to them.”
One of Wagner’s men, a 48-year-old recidivist, was recently arrested on the Bakhmut front.
Photo: Manu Brabo for The Wall Street Journal
Wagner didn’t provide his commando with food, he said, so the men searched for the dead’s rations in the debris-filled trenches that kept freezing and turning back to puddles of mud.
The Wagner soldier was captured after getting lost and stumbling into a Ukrainian position.
Soldiers from Ukraine’s Third Assault Brigade said a Wagner body was left untouched in the no-man’s-land in front of their position for five days. Then one night, one of the other Wagner soldiers crawled out to remove the man’s backpack, leaving the body behind.
Founded by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the former caterer and confidante of President Vladimir Putin, who spent a decade in Soviet prisons for robbery and other crimes, Wagner began around 2014 as a private military company, relying on experienced Russian military veterans and based in Syria, Libya, the Central African Republic and Mali.
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Wagner eased its once-rigid recruiting standards as it raised new forces for the Ukraine War, scoring crucial successes that allowed Russia to seize Ukrainian-held parts of the Luhansk region between May and July. After the losses of that campaign, Mr. Prigozhin secured Mr. Putin’s permission to start recruiting in Russian prison camps.
Detainees were promised an amnesty if they survived six months. Those who desert, surrender, drink, use drugs or have sex should be executed, Mr Prigozhin said in addresses to potential recruits. Video released by Wagner in November showed one of their men, who was captured by Ukraine and then traded back in a prisoner swap, murdered on camera with a blow to the skull from the group’s trademark sledgehammer.
Up to 50,000 prisoners signed up, almost all of them were sent to the Bakhmut front. Mr. Prigozhin, who has confirmed the group’s recruitment tactics and internal rules in several appearances, said Wagner is trying to protect the lives of his recruited inmates. In late February, he also released a photo showing the bodies of several dozen Wagner fighters, an image he said represents just one of the toll casualty collection sites for that day in the Bakhmut area.
Wagner’s goal, Mr. Prigozhin said, was not so much to capture Bakhmut as to crush Ukraine’s military. To a certain extent, this plan worked: as Ukraine deployed some of its best brigades to defend the city in recent months, even a lopsided casualty ratio in favor of Ukrainians ultimately worked to Moscow’s advantage given Russia’s larger population – and the fact that that Russia was trading poorly trained prisoners for the lives of Ukrainian troops.
Such casualties in the Bakhmut area threaten Kiev’s ability to launch a strategic counteroffensive once the current spring mud season ends and dirt roads become passable again.
“The war is not won by the party that gains territory, but by the party that destroys the enemy’s forces,” said Sr. Lt. Horbatenko, the commander of the Third Assault Brigade. “We’re using up too much offensive potential here, which we need for a breakthrough when Ukraine’s black soil dries up.”
Ukrainian soldiers were preparing to move to the front near Bakhmut in March.
Photo: Manu Brabo for The Wall Street Journal
Lt. Vladyslav, center, is a company commander of Ukraine’s 80th Assault Brigade, whose men are protecting one of the approaches to Bakhmut.
Photo: Manu Brabo for The Wall Street Journal
Ukrainian combat casualties are classified. Officers from some other brigades say several units – including some of the best prepared – have been routed by fighting in the Bakhmut area in recent months.
Ukrainian brigades have great differences in training levels and morale, and do not always communicate properly with each other. A company commander said his positions were overrun by Wagner south of Bachmut because a nearby battalion, recruited from poorly trained volunteers, left their assigned area without warning. Wagner’s tactic was to target these weaker units, say Ukrainian commanders in the Bakhmut area.
Mr. Prigozhin, who touts Wagner’s superiority on the battlefield, has repeatedly called Russia’s top military commanders incompetent or worse. Russia’s military has lost well over a hundred tanks and other armored fighting vehicles, as well as hundreds of men, in an unsuccessful push to take the strategic city of Vuhledar in recent weeks. She hasn’t made a breakthrough in other areas either.
Even in Ukrainian captivity, some Wagner soldiers are proud of their organization’s determination. “Which troops of the Russian Ministry of Defense? What can you do?” said a 29-year-old convict recruited by Wagner and captured in Bakhmut at the end of February. “You need to be rejuvenated, energized a bit. You’ve lost your former steel. Our ancestors had taken Berlin, they were real men… Now look…”
Mr. Prigozhin’s conflict with the Defense Ministry in Moscow means Wagner’s recruitment to the prison has been halted, limiting the organization’s ability to continue with its current human-wave tactics. Even if Mr. Prigozhin persuades the Kremlin to restore access to the Russian prison camps, news of Wagner’s staggering losses at Bakhmut has already trickled back, scaring off many remaining potential recruits.
The 48-year-old Wagner soldier, who was captured by Ukraine, said he originally enlisted in October but was not selected at the time because he had hepatitis C. Then, on December 30, Wagner changed his stance in the face of staff shortages. The man was transported to the training ground in the Luhansk region. All of the men in the camp had either hepatitis C, identified by a white bracelet, HIV, identified by a red bracelet, or both. The 29-year-old Wagner soldier who was captured by the Ukrainians said he contracted HIV in prison.
“Wagner is also running out of people. You can’t sustain this,” said Lt. Vladyslav, company commander of Ukraine’s 80th Assault Brigade, whose men are protecting one of the approaches to Bakhmut and recently captured another Wagner. “Even in Russia there are not enough men seeking suicide on our land.”
“Wagner is also running out of people. You can’t sustain this,” said Lt. Vladyslav.
Photo: Manu Brabo for The Wall Street Journal
—Ievgeniia Sivorka contributed to this article.
Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at [email protected]
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