Great Power contentions

[Montmorency]

As I said in my followup comment, once I realized that the leak was more than a single dump of 8 or 10 documents from a Ukraine briefing, I discarded the deliberate leak theory. If military intelligence somehow tricked a young, far-right wargaming gloomer into leaking a vast and varied, but curated, document dump, it would have to be the most elaborate disinfo op in history. I don't believe we have that level of competence in our ranks, particularly with respect to the realm of virtual culture (I've veritably posted at least one video from the Youtuber whose Discord was caught up in the chain on the Org before).

Macron was rather misrepresented in the headlines. If you read the original interview he was arguing - as he has in the past really - that there should be a coordinated European agenda helping set the pace of global affairs, that the EU shouldn't just be in a position to be trailing American whims. We should know by now not to put too much stock in media pull quotes.

I don't understand all the videos I've seen from both sides of tanks pulling up to within 50m or less of a trench and laying down fire to neutralize. I never thought I would see much of that outside videogames, since the danger of exposing the tank like that is immense and the whole purpose of contemporary optics is to allow such work to be carried out from beyond naked visual range. If the enemy squad or whatever has literally any friendlies nearby, a tank parked by a trench for 5 minutes is an easy target for artillery, drones, air support, ATGMs, anything really.

[spmetla]

Macron was rather misrepresented in the headlines. If you read the original interview he was arguing - as he has in the past really - that there should be a coordinated European agenda helping set the pace of global affairs, that the EU shouldn't just be in a position to be trailing American whims. We should know by now not to put too much stock in media pull quotes.

I read his comments as well but he articulated it poorly and did not strongly correct it. Yes, Europe should be able to have an independent course of the US and China, that would start by taking strong unified stands on issues. Macron's constantly trying to help Russia save face and not seeing the Taiwan straits as a European issue is ridiculous. Which nation or politician really represents Europe right now? Certainly not Macron, Scholtz, or anyone else at the moment.

I don't understand all the videos I've seen from both sides of tanks pulling up to within 50m or less of a trench and laying down fire to neutralize. I never thought I would see much of that outside videogames, since the danger of exposing the tank like that is immense and the whole purpose of contemporary optics is to allow such work to be carried out from beyond naked visual range. If the enemy squad or whatever has literally any friendlies nearby, a tank parked by a trench for 5 minutes is an easy target for artillery, drones, air support, ATGMs, anything really.

The way I see it is that's why the tank rolled up first, to assess if they have anti-tank capabilities after which it was followed up by the IFV and infantry.
Seeing as there is a drone filming this is one of those situations where a mounted Mk-19 grenade launcher would be absolutely ideal and that's one of the strong points of the older wester APCs where to have that capability you merely need the right CSW mount.

This unit must be tasked at that moment to be a mop up unit and I imagine the front line of troops is a few hundred or thousand meters away at this point with other units in contact with other Russian forces. That trench is certainly isolated and looks like it was given the job of essentially being a speedbump which it arguably did by delaying/distracting some UAF for a bit.

[Montmorency]

As a matter of national security, it's well past time to acknowledge that DoD needs a Dank Online Materiel Exploitation program to coopt the groypers and gamers (healthy young men who seek patriotic, violence-infused, and racially-charged companionship online, per the media).

Just heard MSNBC live reporter say that there are no indicators Jack Texiera—hard right Catholic gun zealot & conspiracy theorist who hated government, called Ukrainians pigs, and screamed racist & antisemitic memes—has any “political motives.”

You're right, the footages we see of tanks in close with isolated trenches could be carefully-selected set-piece actions with bounded risk. I still hope it isn't SOP for Ukraine though (sending out poorly-supported tank platoons as screening or vanguard forces has been a common cause of Russian armored losses anyway).

But then, I also wonder why in these clips the tanks belch out what seems like half their HE allotment for a couple of guys in a trench, as fast as they can. What happened to MGs?

[Montmorency]

Investigative report by independent Russian media into why Putin decided to go to war.
https://verstka.media/kak-putin-pridumal-voynu

[Montmorency]

I'm beginning to come around to there being a serious case for expecting a Ukrainian offensive in the Bakhmut area. Relevant factors include the large Ukrainian grouping present since the winter and the arguable fact that RuFOR is weaker here than in any other sector of the contested front. If the offensive advanced the line 25km, it would erase Russian gains in most or all of North Donetsk since the beginning of the invasion (with Russia being unlikely to ever be able to, in the context of these hostilities, gather up enough strength to grind through this territory anew), and to advance 50 km would allow Ukraine to threaten the long separatist-held cities of Alchevsk and Horlivka, or more precisely Horlivka's primary GLOC to Russia.

However, I find it very hard to believe that UFOR would give up this year's opportunity to attack in the south for a crack at inherently-lesser gains in the central front. The only way I can see my way to it is in the case of a dual offensive, and yet I find it even harder to believe that UFOR could successfully and productively divide its whole, limited, strategic reserve (including scarce artillery and air defense ordnance) between two theaters.

Also, UFOR in the sector is itself seemingly-exhausted, even if not to the same extent as their counterpart, so strategic reserves would likely have to be routed there to support an offensive. Such a movement should be detectable to OSINT at any rate.

But maybe a secondary offensive to draw off and tie down Russian reserves, with the stretch goal of recovering the line of contact as of December, is feasible. Or maybe the entire discourse is disinformation of the sort we saw last summer.

[spmetla]

I personally think there will be a limited counterattack at Bakhmut beyond what we've seen today in order to keep those VDV and wagner forces fixed there to set conditions for an offensive elsewhere. Russia doesn't appear to have a large strategic or operational reserve given the forces wasted on fruitless winter assaults. Fixing their tier 1 forces at Bakhmut given that it's a prestige fight now, kinda in the line of Stalingrad may allow for greater success elsewhere.
Still think the major offensive will be in the south and not toward Svatove though, if the UAF can reach the Azov Sea and limit Crimean GLOCs to the kerch bridge they may be able to siege or if fast enough take the peninsula.

Sitting on pins and needles wondering how/where/when it will start though. Will it be a shock and awe rapid start or rather a gradual but relentless increase of pressure at multiple points before selecting the right point for penetration and exploitation?

[Montmorency]

AFAIK the core RuFOR present in the Bakhmut sector (S of Rozdolivka down to the canal W of Klischiivka) are no more than 10K Wagner bayonet strength, and between one and two nominal divisions of VDV. Simply put, the starting point for Ukraine is with own force better matched to opfor around Bakhmut than anywhere else, namely the equivalent of 10-15 full brigades as of now. As I've pointed out time and again since the beginning of the year in various parts, RuFOR has done a better job of pinning many UFOR formations in Bakhmut than vice versa (and UFOR could have avoided this by performing a brigade-size counterattack to stabilize the Soledar-Yakovlivka breach around New Year's...).

But UFOR around Bakhmut hasn't done that swell a job holding back the enemy since the period of peak strength (late February), and its pretty drained itself, hence my doubt as to whether it could mount a serious offensive in the sector without directing additional resources there - resources I don't believe they can spare from a southern offensive.

Kofman is a good analyst, though even he habitually tilts toward overestimating the Ukrainian side of the equation:

In Bakhmut UA sought to attrition Russian forces and fix them long enough to launch the spring offensive. But, the evidence is scant that UA still enjoys a significantly favorable attrition ratio, or that it is fixing a substantial Russian force... The reason Bakhmut matters is not because it will directly impede UA offensive prospects, but because force quality is difficult to regenerate (and ammo finite). What UA spends now it may miss later this year when the offensive is over, and may struggle to sustain momentum.

Given the totality of factors as I have recently assessed them, I have come to believe that it is not outrageous to expect that GSUA specifically will determine to conduct a feint, even if the prospect seems suboptimal to me. But if it occurs it really depends on the goals and subsequent costs. Optimistically, we could say that if there is a successful gradual break-in against the VDV that RuFOR frontline and reserve assets from Donetsk City northward will not be available to reinforce the south.

Another needless failure and drain on resources is of course not out of the question.

Svatove/Luhansk, as I detailed half a year ago or so, only makes (made) sense to pursue inasmuch as it could open an axis of attack into core Donbass from the north. Without that access it's a road to nowhere. It is also an area where RuFOR will simply always be better-supplied than its counterpart (as opposed to Bakhmut, where it's about equal at a good level, and Zaporizhzhia, where UFOR is better off with a major city in their rear). We know for sure that UFOR is distinctly outnumbered in Luhansk and has historically done a terrible job overcoming prepared defenses there. There's veritably been a pure stalemate north of the Severodonetsk River for more than half a year! I expect it to remain that way. I contextualize it in terms of the Italian theater in both world wars.

The Russians notably struck the Pavlohrad rail junction with missiles a few days ago, but that doesn't tell us much, since its location makes it essential to the supply of basically all active areas of the front.

Something that took me by surprise was the early-spring weather. Usually the advance forecasts available throughout the war have been pretty accurate a month or even two months out. Thus, in February and early March, I expected that there should primarily be rain along the frontline in late March and early April, and not too much thereafter for the rest of April. As it turned out of course, late March saw a major snowstorm and April was just an unremitting wall of rain. There seemed to be appreciable precipitation on the vast majority of days. And when it comes to Bakhmut, the city sits in a river valley... This week the rain has finally let up, and forecasts tell us to expect June and the second half of May to be dry enough. Hopefully the April forecasts were just a fluke.

My baseline prediction, against which to judge deviation: There will be a Ukrainian offensive within 2 months; at least 90% of it will be in the south; which will cover a frontage somewhere within 100km of the Dnieper (i.e. before the Zapo-Donetsk admin border, which is a longwinded way of saying "in Zaporizhzhia"); it will secure two of the theater close pivot points (Vasylivka, Tokmak, Polohy) before culminating.


Catalogues of full-strength brigades that might be involved in the offensive:

[Montmorency]

I'd like to talk a little about how I came to a figure of 10K Wagner "bayonet strength" around Bakhmut (in the given geographic definition). Note that I had not seen Prigozhin's May 2 remark that 26000 convicts had completed their 6-month contracts at the time of my comment.

Some history of Wagner's participation in the war is required:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Wagner's strength at the beginning of 2022 was rather murky, and AFAIK no good estimates existed. But based on older estimates, it was a minimum of 5K globally, perhaps much more.

Wagner as I understand typically maintains several thousand, say 1-2K personnel, in Russia at any time as its training, recruitment, and admin base, as well as personnel on rotation. Some thousands are present at any time at Wagner's bases of operation in Syria and throughout Africa. I do not expect a significant level of rotation between Africa/ME and Ukraine, because of the difference in built-up expertise between branches, as well as the complications of long-distance travel. I have always excluded Wagner personnel outside Ukraine from my calculations.

Wagner first appeared publicly in Ukraine in March, right around the seasonal transition. AFAIK Wagner was considered to have 5K personnel in Ukraine by the height of the spring offensive in May (when it was relying on LDPR conscripts for bulk infantry, somewhat akin to the future role the convicts would fill). Wagner was fundamentally implicated in the Popasna salient, the outflanking of Lysychansk, the grind towards Bakhmut - more or less all RuFOR progress on the central front since the start of the invasion.

IIRC public information on the convict recruitment campaign indicates that Prigozhin was visiting prisons from June, clearly looking ahead. It took until late summer for recruitment to really pick up, during which time the separatists were given some form of reprieve and the Russian military's draft was initiated. July and August in general were the quietest months of the war up to then, as both sides regenerated their expended resources and HIMARS caused a temporary shock to Russian logistics. UFOR also fully integrated 155mm artillery platforms and RuFOR focused on preparing to meet future UFOR offensives.

Throughout the fall Wagner escalated its activity in Donetsk again, maintaining a heavy presence along the central front from Toretsk/Mayorsk all the way to Bilohorivka. Progress was very slow. The absorption of and transition to penal assault waves was not complete and UFOR still had some space to trade along the Bakhmut Line.

By December, US intel releases claimed that Wagner fielded 10K pros and 40K convicts. This is one of those curiously-low figures that comes out of US intel. For example, I seem to recall a US estimate last summer of 5K Wagner KIA, a number I can no longer locate cite for, and which I suspect includes casualties of separatists commanded by Wagner. As of early February this year, the estimate was at least 9K KIA total, most of which over the winter, obviously inconsistent with the earlier elusive estimate. This week's estimate was of around 10K Wagner KIA from either the beginning of the year or the beginning of December (unclear). 1K Wagner KIA in almost 3 months of fighting in Bakhmut is absurdly low and well below Prigozhin's intimations anyway, even if over the course of the year Wagner's area of responsibility in the central front has shrunk and shrunk until by the early spring they were pretty much only actively fighting in Bakhmut itself and its immediate outskirts, with regular military and a few minor/new PMCs (which may or may not themselves be offshoots of Wagner) supplementing them. 10K Wagner KIA January through April would at least be more consistent with the US February estimate. As of late March, Milley attested that "It's probably about 6,000 or so actual mercenaries and maybe another 20 or 30,000 recruits that they get."

But in the end we do know US intel relies heavily on media reporting and OSINT of varying quality to generate these reports, and as this article points out, the product is often flawed or even figmentary. So I only use those figures as another guidepost.
https://ridl.io/lies-damn-lies-and-s...lly-recruited/

Here are the figures I use that I think fit best with the totality of the evidence:

In December/January I entertained higher estimates of Wagner convict recruitment, such as 65-70K, but by now I've settled on 60K, with the last 6-month contracts signed in January.

Over the course of 2022, a total of 70-75K unique individuals served in (we could say "passed through") Wagner. 60K of these were convicts, 10-15K pros (Wagner has been recruiting heavily throughout the war). It should be clear that this does not mean that Wagner's available strength at any given time was 75K. I estimate 12-15K of the convicts were already 'irrecoverable' casualties consequent particularly to the fighting in October-December, along with 3K pros. Thus for 2022 I estimated at least 15K irrecoverable Wagner casualties (including desertions but excluding pros who declined to reup their contracts, who are discussed later).


I have always used a heuristic of two irrecoverable WIA for every KIA with RuFOR losses btw. Assessments from the US and many other sources use a 4x multiplier, which I halve to crudely exclude those returned to duty after recuperation. There may be a better argument for a 1.5x multiplier, the consequences of which I explore briefly below, but that's a matter for another day.

Based on the February US estimate of 9K Wagner KIA in total, a contemporaneous Russian media investigation documenting through paperwork a floor of 8K Wagner dead, and ground-level reports from both belligerents, I figure that on average in January-April there were 2.5K convict KIA and 0.5K pro KIA per month, for a total of 10+2K KIA and 20+4K WIA.

Total Wagner losses: Convict: 14-15K KIA; 28-30K WIA
Pro: 3K KIA; 6K WIA
KIA: 17-18K
WIA: 34-36K
SUM: 51-4K

Round to 55K to include short-term pros passing through the group, as I assume an outflow of 10-33% of pros per year of combat (Wagner contracts are usually 3 or 6 months and evidently more flexible than those with the MoD). Captures are negligible.

Subtraction leaves us with a range of 15-20K Wagner in Ukraine. So how did I get 10K at Bakhmut? Well, it is known that Prigozhin and/or Russian higher-ups like to keep some Wagner detachments scattered throughout the theater of war as security forces and perhaps a strategic reserve. For example, IIRC two Wagner battalions (500 men?) were dispatched to help stabilize the Luhansk front in September. Moreover, some proportion of Wagner forces will be involved in garrison and support duties, including Wagner's independent artillery branch. Wagner does predominantly receive its logistical and artillery support from the MTO and SVRF respectively, but it is known to have its internal capabilities.

So I rounded it down to 10K "bayonet" strength at Bakhmut.


An interesting question is whether the new information in Prigozhin's figure of 26K completed convict contracts includes those with significant, or even disabling, injuries. The output is affected quite a lot depending on the answer. Obviously 26+55 is a lot more than a cumulative strength of 70. We might compromise by assuming that convicts past some level of injury serve as support, transport, or other miscellaneous personnel, but that's highly speculative. Would Wagner bother to keep around or invest in individuals who may need weeks of rehabilitation just to become available for heavy manual labor? In this case, 30-26=4K heavily injured convicts retained by Wagner.

At any rate, if the 26K figure is truthful, it makes it unlikely that Wagner recruited only 40K convicts between June and January, although it is possible if the figure does include all the seriously wounded, and the very smallest KIA estimates are used. We can pretty much rule out that a light/moderate wound is grounds for amicable release on these terms, as that would only be compatible with very small KIA or recruitment figures, given that the majority of all convicts would have passed the 6-month threshold by now even had none of them died (half a year ago was already November).

Separately, I realized we should also add a few thousand, maybe 5K, to the number of unique Wagnerites to account for 2023 recruitment. This includes their extensive public campaign as well as some number, likely between 1-10%, of convicts who decided to join as pros following completion of their term of service (these not properly added to cumulative unique individuals but to active strength at a point in time).

If we try again with 1.5x WIA ratio this time:

Total Wagner losses: Convict: 14-15K KIA; 21-22.5K WIA
Pro: 3K KIA; 4.5K WIA
KIA: 17-18K
WIA: 25.5-27K
SUM: 42.5-45K

If we subtract all convict WIA from the cumulative fulfillment figure, we get a range of 3.5-5K, which we add to the sum as representing a small set of convicts outlasting their term without grievous harm, for the new range of 46-50K, comfortably rounding up to 50K to fudge the short-termer pros. In this case though there would be 25-30K total Wagner in Ukraine as of now (70 or 75 + 5 - 50 = 25-30). For reference, Milley's late March range of 26-36K would transform to about 16-26K as of early May if applying my cumulative attrition numbers.

According to the foregoing too, Wagner has run through 2/3 of all its convicts, and no more than 10% of convicts can expect discharge without death or significant injury. Sounds about right.

What I take away from this is that despite the wide plausible ranges in which we can tweak most of the variables (total recruitment, KIA, WIA ratio), my baseline estimates of at least 60K convicts recruited, and around 15-20K Wagner remaining active in Ukraine, are at least plausible. What I have previously been most tentative about is my treatment of the pros; it is admittedly daunting to conclude that anywhere from a third (7.5/20) to 90% (9/10) of everyone who passed through the core of Wagner in Ukraine left as a casualty in the war so far. The latter should be dismissed; I would bet the true figure is between 25-50%.

I would update my current estimate to 20K total Wagner in Ukraine in light of the additional information presented by Prigozhin altogether. But it doesn't greatly affect my assessment of Wagner strength around Bakhmut, especially as one to two thousand are still being drained by the week to all causes.

Read the wall above to get a better sense of why for the past 2+ months Prigozhin has been warning that he will remove Wagner from active hostilities before long. Just abstractly, it was obvious that since his shtrafbat campaign was cut off and coopted by the Russian military in January he only had at most until the midpoint of the year to conduct bulk infantry tactics (the first formal separations or fulfillments by convicts were around the time of the capture of Soledar) before his self-imposed contractual time limit left Wagner almost where it had started the war with no further sources of rapid expansion.

So it wasn't surprising that throughout February and March Wagner was reckless in trying to storm Bakhmut, a target with some strategic value but moreover immense prestige value to Prigozhin personally. The motivation also explains how as Wagner progressively shrank it largely abandoned (by the start of spring) its attempt to operationally encircle Bakhmut and instead focused on the conceptually-inadvisable approach of just grinding out UFOR from Bakhmut through frontal urban assaults. This was actually the best case for UFOR in staging a fighting retreat from Bakhmut and preserving the grouping there, in that the pace and axis of engagement did not threaten UFOR with a hasty retreat of compressed forces across a muddy plain. But Prigozhin did emphasize as far back as February that he literally just wanted to secure the city to declare his victory.

What does surprise me is that by available reports the Russian MoD is signing thousands of convicts on similar 6-month contracts. If you're going to go as far as abolishing your prisons at least squeeze as much performance out of the ex-cons as you are from your stop-lossed contractors and draftees! Not like prisoners have more leverage over the government...

[Montmorency]

Indeed, Prigozhin claims he is in the process of moving Wagner to the reserve and assisting Kadyrov's Chechens (most of whom serve formally as part of Rosgvardia AFAIK) in taking up the slack in Bakhmut.

Butthurt as he may about not fully capturing Bakhmut before the 'deadline', this is the best option for our budding Bond villain. Not only does he still get to keep up the PR rivalry with the Russian military, he can cultivate his year-old alliance with Kadyrov by allowing him the chance to win valor for his own personage (in taking the credit for "victory"). But moreover, Prigozhin as warlord gets to retrieve and reconstitute a much-enlarged and battle-hardened Wagner Group for all manner of profitable adventures in Africa. Wagner with the full support of another state sponsor would definitely beat up most African militaries and steal their slave labor colonies.

I predicted at the beginning of the war that one unintended consequence, besides increased unmonitored weapons flows around the world, would be the presence of many thousands of Ukrainian and Russian mercenaries around the world for decades to come. Clearly part of that inheritance is going to be more organized than I envisioned.

(A few weeks ago, Prigozhin did comment that Putin should place Russian forces wholly on the defensive and preserve territorial gains, and the US intel reporting seems to indicate that Putin is committing to that course. OTOH intelligent observers were pointing that this was Russia's best option back in the summer of 2022...)

Side note: Wagner confirmed difficulties with rotating personnel between Ukraine and Africa (one of my assumptions in working out Wagner losses above), but blames the MoD for a lack of assistance.



TIL that the Bundestag is across the street from the Russian embassy in Germany.

A few years ago, working at the Bundestag's foreign affairs committee, I was told to please leave the windows unlocked during my break so the builders outside could use the restrooms on our floor. When I suggested this may be unsafe (computer passwords on post-its etc) I got a

My supervisor then turned around, pointed at the embassy across the street, and - enunciating every word - said, "if they wanted to listen to us, all they'd need to do is read my lips." A few months later, the entire infrastructure had to be ripped out for Russian penetration

The German security state has an amusing bifurcation of people so absolutely paranoid they haven't used their real first names in years, whose products it takes a week of bureaucratic wrangling to even read, and people who absolutely do not give a flipping .

And naturally, these two feed each other. The paranoids find highly classified info in Spiegel or Russian diplomatic cables, and the ordinary bureaucrats spend undue time trying to get an intelligence briefing which turns out to be little more than a three week old news summary.

[Montmorency]

As some predicted, the Bakhmut sector has heated up; Ukrainian attacks have been conducted up and down the line over the past 48 hours, with some success. So Wagner won't get to extract itself one way or another. So far only locally-available UFOR assets participated according to public reporting, although I have seen rumors that two fresh brigades have just arrived. While it's not exactly an Operation Uranus so far, if local Ukrainian units can gain momentum against the local enemy units, then it may force GSRU's hand on the allocation of reserves.

Weather in the south - accounting for the gradual soil drying process - should be optimal starting in two weeks.

[Montmorency]

Following some battalion-scale attacks a few weeks ago around Bakhmut, UFOR gained some ground and the intensity has reduced somewhat - though smaller attacks continue around the flanks daily, while Wagner continues to grind forward in the city. It's honestly shocking and fantastic that (a) Wagner committed since the end of winter to frontal urban assaults instead of expanding the salient north of the city; (b) UFOR managed to secure the flanks to the city just as 90+% of it was in enemy hands.

Had Ukraine been able to fight at Bakhmut with such secure flanks for the past 3 months, the situation could have been called very good. Now there's practically no Ukrainian salient into the city, and for the first time in 3 months the LOC into the city and its outskirts are relatively free. So while the winter breach north of Bakhmut was an error on GSUA's part, it has functionally been corrected at last and there's nothing but frontal assaults in store for RuFOR in the sector. Also, reducing or removing the canal bridgehead between Bakhmut and Toretsk - maintained by RuFOR since around the start of the year - is important for denying them future opportunities and axes of attack.



Given RuFOR's net progress of 10-15km in 6 months, it seems likely that they'll never have the capacity to even threaten Slovyansk/Kramatorsk ever again. Note that Prigozhin just now blogged the original OPLAN for clearing out the whole area south of Siversk east of the Donbas Canal (which, to be clear, was widely recognized at the outset because it's obvious); after the key tactical successes we witnessed in the winter almost everyone expected substantial progress towards this goal by now, as opposed to a costly urban combat quagmire. It's a dramatic underperformance from even relatively-low expectations. (And I'm not talking about the pro-Russian clowns who have been insisting for months that the final collapse of the Ukrainian lines is imminent, along with the encirclement of 15000, or other such very specific and implausible figures, in Bakhmut itself.)

So whether or not there are any further offensive moves around Bakhmut, the situation finally looks favorably stable.



(Yellow circles represent areas recently cleared according to evidence from both sides)

Nearly 11 months' progress:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Graph purporting to show gross reported Russian missile (not drone) fires into Ukraine since last September (over 1000 including anti-ship and SAM in ground attack):

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

[Montmorency]

There was a raid into Belgorod, bigger than previous ones, but still of no importance, which currently seems to have been conducted more as a PR stunt than to achieve strategic misdirection.


Prigozhin just delivered a major interview. Unfortunately, I can't find a transcript and I can't access the original on Telegram or any video platform (I haven't gone to the trouble of verifying an account, and the webview platform I used to rely on seems to be out of business). This is an important concern, as media paraphrases often fail to accurately convey some or all of the message, and indeed there are many divergent reports and commentaries on Prigozhin's words.

So this is what I'm relatively confident about was claimed by Prigozhin without seeing the original source:

Wagner is in the process of leaving Bakhmut and will be mostly, but not entirely, in the reserve from June 1 for regeneration. Prigozhin did indeed wait until the final capture of Bakhmut (May 20) to proceed. 

Wagner had 50K convicts available for the Battle of Bakhmut, which in Prigozhin's definition appears to include the area from the canal (~Andriivka) north to at least Soledar if not to the Donetsk-Luhansk boundary. 
The timeline offered is unclear however, since it is possible to define a Battle of Bakhmut as beginning anytime from early summer 2022 to late winter 2023 depending on bounding; 
or from the beginning of November if starting with the Battle of Opytne, Bakhmut's adjacent suburb; or from early January if counting from the fall of Soledar; 
or from late December if starting with the first Wagner inroads on Soledar; or from late July if starting with the first attacks on Soledar - and so on. 
If I had to guess though, I imagine Prigozhin counts from sometime in last December. 

20% of convicts were KIA. Either a similar number or a similar proportion of contractors were also KIA. (As we'll see the latter is more in line with his other claims.)

Ukraine suffered 50K KIA in the battle, and 50-70K WIA. 

Referencing his concrete claim on Ukrainian casualties, Prigozhin asserts that Wagner KIA were about three times fewer than UFOR KIA, and Wagner WIA were two times fewer. 
This would equate to ~16K KIA and 25-33K WIA. I assume in this interview he uses WIA to refer to heavily wounded. Even then, I would note that these are outlandishly-low 
KIA:WIA ratios for Ukraine (as little as 1), but plausible for Wagner specifically (i.e. roughly 1.5-2, mirroring my long discussion earlier in this thread).

This would also equate to ~6K KIA among contractors.

Comparing to my long analysis:

We have a claim of 50K convicts with 10K KIA; 30K contractors with 6K KIA (20% of 30K is 6K); +/- 30K WIA overall, all over a period of at least 5 months.

First point of order is that the implicit claim on the number of contractors is really high; it's hard to believe it can be true. And if we take some commentators' interpretation that Prigozhin said contractors took the same number KIA as convicts, rather than same proportion, then he would had to have possessed 50K contractors, which I categorically reject. Maybe Prigozhin's was improperly factoring in convicts who became contractors plus Wagner contractors around the world?

Regardless, what Prigozhin is saying about contractor death rates is definitely allusive to a higher death rate than I preferred to countenance.

And of course the stock figure of 50K convicts matches a lot of the wintertime reporting, lower than my estimate of as high as 65K.

Note however that a synthetic figure of 50K + 30K = 80K is extremely close to my former estimate of unique individuals who had passed through Wagner Group within Ukraine between March 2022 and the start of May 2023. Also, my estimate for total KIA was 17-18K, and 25.5-36K WIA in that period.

On Twitter today one of the Mediazona/BBC obituary researchers estimated with as-yet unpublished data at least 10K confirmed Wagner KIA.

This all makes a good deal of sense if you adjust Prigozhin's claims as follows, for example (they were never for taking at face value anyway):

55K convicts + 25K contractors unique wartime individuals (potentially counting convicts who became contractors)
5K irrecoverable convict casualties August-November '22 (e.g. 1.8K KIA + 3.15K WIA at 1.75x)
5K irrecoverable contractor casualties March-November '22 (e.g. 1.8K KIA + 3.15K WIA at 1.75x)
== 3.6K KIA & 6.3K WIA March-November '22 [Lower than my previous estimate to account for lower convict head count]
Ignore entirely any Ukraine-deployed contractors did not remain employed by Wagner in the course of the war; assume contract recruitment among ex-cons and the general public makes it all up
10K convict KIA December-May '23
6K contractor KIA December-May '23
28K WIA December-May '23 at 1.75x
== ==
19.6K KIA & 34.3K WIA overall (54K casualties)

This brings us down to 26K remaining Wagner in Ukraine before excluding convicts who have graduated without heavy injury. By the beginning of June, we can figure that a minimum of 80% of all convict recruits will have passed their 6-month milestone even had they all sat things out in Russia, playing bingo. We can guess from the estimates above that at least half of all convicts were either KIA or dischargeably WIA depending on how we play with ratios; the overriding thing is that, assuming attrition is evenly spread across convict cohorts - this can't be true but it's good enough for our purposes - there simply could not be more than 5.5K convicts remaining in Wagner employ.

That leaves Prigozhin with, as a broad estimate hinging particularly on how we interpret Prigozhin's contractor head count and distribute WIA between branches, 4K contractors and ~~5K convicts.

All those convicts will either be gone or contracted by early summer. RUMINT has it that the Russian military has meanwhile recruited 10K convicts for its own purposes.

I wouldn't be surprised if Prigozhin exfiltrates his professional core and leaves the depreciating asset of convicts behind in Bakhmut to face any Ukrainian moves.



The bottom line is that my earlier estimates comport surprisingly well with Prigozhin's claims on Wagner strength/losses, but leave my ultimate 20K estimate from 3 weeks ago too high by perhaps 5K - that is to say, my estimate of 15K prior to adjusting for Prigozhin's figures on convict discharges may have been inadvertently near-perfect.


NB. One thing Prigozhin could be lying about outright, with respect to own losses specifically, is the ratio of losses between convicts and contractors. In which case elements of my long analysis would be more correct instead.

[Montmorency]

This war has seen the development of improvised jousting between small observation drones as a method of neutralizing enemy assets.

In the absence of any good/available NATO kamikaze drones, and partially as a challenge to Russian kamikaze drones (e.g. Lancet), Ukraine developed a small cottage industry of makeshift kamikaze ("FPV") drones.

Someone put two and two together. At last, the problem of enemy tactical UAS observation has a systematic solution. (Note: DoD will not be funding this solution for the US military)

https://twitter.com/i/status/1661535520613183489[VIDEO]


EDIT: Just noticed the WSJ article mentioning offhand that the US has transferred "over 2 million" 155mm shells so far. As the US stopped publishing figures for PDA munitions transfers from February, the rate of 155mm donations between February and May (the latest PDA was a few days ago, so can't have been delivered yet) must have been at least triple that of the first full year.

Ukraine probably has more than 1 million 155mm stockpiled between all sources of donation and purchase, and 3-4 hundred 155mm cannon in active service. I had previously estimated around half a million.

I'm going to upgrade my prior forecast of the degree of success of the upcoming strategic offensive, though I'm unsure by how much that should be.