(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



Some Thoughts About Prigozhin's Recent Tirade and Threats, and What it Means for Wagner and Bakhmut [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags']

Date: 2023-05-05

Let's do some armchair general math, if you'll indulge me. As kos described in his diary, that’s about 399 deaths over 4 days. In warfare, for any who don’t know, a “casualty” is any fighter rendered unable to fight either due to injury (WIA) or death (KIA).

50% casualties are historically some of the highest numbers ever seen in even the bloodiest of battles. That’s held true across most of history, especially modern warfare. It's rare to kill everyone on one side to a man, especially since the end of ancient warfare and the rise of concepts like war crimes and POWs. That’s not to say some groups aren’t wiped out or suffer worse rates, but it’s very uncommon. Simply put: at least some people survive all but the worst defeats. So, we know that couldn’t be everyone.

There's also no way that there were no wounded for all those dead. Wounded almost always outnumber the dead (it’s easier to injure people than to kill them, and often wounded soldiers stop fighting and thus are less likely to be finished off). We can’t know how many for sure if Prigozhin doesn’t say, but let's be conservative and say it was a particularly suicidal engagement and the ratio between KIA and WIA is 1:1. That's 798 casualties so far, and we’ll round up to 800 (2 more wounded, we'll say).

That's at least 100 8-man squads. But, remember, that would imply they suffered 100% casualties. There's no way that Wagner could advance if everyone involved was killed or wounded. Someone, multiple someones, had to be alive at the end to hold the new ground taken. Let's be generous and say Wagner's forces suffered some truly terrifying casualties but still moved the line forward. Say, ~75% casualties. That means over four days, three out of every four men involved was injured or killed. If you had three friends in your squad on Saturday, you were the last man standing a week later. Again, that’s the best-case scenario here for Wagner because it means the fewest possible casualties: more wounded means more men lost in action.

So, that comes out to around 1,100 men over four days involved in combat. Assuming a couple short handed squads due to the realities of war, we're talking about 140 8-man squads. But those weren’t 24 hour days of fighting. For one, we know Russia has pretty much no night vision gear, and even if they did they're damn sure not gonna waste it on walking corpses. Wagner is a BUSINESS, and NVGs aren’t cheap.



So, we’re talking daylight attacks only. Right now, Ukraine is having about 14.75 hours of daylight per day. So, that's 59 hours of daylight in total. 140 squads, about 2.37 squads per hour. To advance less than a kilometer.



Now, that’s horrific, but look at it from Prigozhin’s point of view: he runs a mercenary company, not a nation. He doesn’t have unlimited manpower and there are only so many convicts he can recruit, even in a brutally repressive and depressed country like Russia. He has operations across Africa and in Syria that need manpower and support.



At the VERY BEST, he’s lost 800 fighters in 4 days. That’s a fair but conservative estimate, and every 25 minutes he loses more men, at least 6 at a time at the most conservative. Three of them are dead. That’s 7 dead fighters per hour. Fighters he needs to keep his company afloat. Fighters who are dying to help Putin and his closest lickspittles and lapdogs in power and money while he is being ruined, financially and professionally.



Of course he’s furious. They’re driving his company into the ground. I think he’s serious about withdrawing on May 9th, if only because 200 casualties per day isn’t sustainable. A few more weeks of this and they won’t have the manpower to go cow tipping.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/5/5/2167688/-Some-Thoughts-About-Prigozhin-s-Recent-Tirade-and-Threats-and-What-it-Means-for-Wagner-and-Bakhmut

Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/