The Wagner Group’s efforts to take Bakhmut are ongoing, but Ukrainian fighters claim to be seeing signs that the offensive is running out of steam at last after weeks of desperate efforts to take the town at any cost.
Six weeks after coming to help defend Bakhmut, the men of the Adam Tactical Group, one of Ukraine’s most effective battle units, were quietly confident they had turned the tide against Russian troops trying to encircle and capture it.
“The enemy exhausted all its reserves,” the commander, Col. Yevhen Mezhevikin, 40, said on Tuesday, straddling a chair as artillery, air defense and intelligence-gathering teams worked around him…
But now, Colonel Mezhevikin said, the Russian assaults have slowed and the imminent threat of encirclement has been thwarted. “The density of assaults dropped by several times,” he said. “Before, they could assault in all directions simultaneously and in groups of not less than 20, 30 or 40 people, but gradually it is dying down.”
Ukraine has been waiting for the arrival of western supplies, including tanks and APCs which arrived this week, as well as new troops who are now completing training.
Meanwhile western estimates suggest Wagner really has depleted its forces. Yesterday, U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff General Mark Milley testified that Wagner had about 6,000 mercenaries and another 20,000 to 30,000 prison conscripts. As the Institute for the Study of War notes, that a significant drop from US estimates made last December.
US Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff General Mark Milley reported on March 29 that the Wagner Group has around 6,000 professional personnel and 20,000 to 30,000 recruits, mostly convicts, fighting in the Bakhmut area.[22] US National Security Council Spokesperson John Kirby reported in late December 2022 that the Wagner Group had 50,000 personnel in Ukraine including 10,000 contractors and 40,000 convict recruits.[23] The Wagner Group has deployed the vast majority of its force to support the offensive to capture Bakhmut, and it is likely that the difference between Kirby’s 50,000 figure in Ukraine and Milley’s 26,000 to 36,000 figure in the Bakhmut area is the result of casualties from Wagner’s attritional offensive on Bakhmut.
Wagner’s strength will continue to drop in coming weeks as most of their conscripts have 6-month contracts.
The Wagner Group may lose thousands more convict recruits in the upcoming weeks as convicts finish their six-month military contracts, and the Wagner leadership appears for now to be allowing pre-pardoned convicts to return from the frontlines to Russia at the conclusion of those contracts.
But the crushing of Wagner’s forces have come at a high cost:
Serhii Filimonov, the commander of an assault company on the northern flank of the city, also described heavy fighting and questioned the value of defending Bakhmut at the cost of some of his best special-operations forces.
Dropping back from the front line to a restaurant in a nearby town, the commander recalled fighting alongside a famous Ukrainian fighter, Dmytro Kotsiubailo, commander of the Da Vinci Wolves Battalion, when he was killed this month in a Russian artillery strike…
In early March, Mr. Kotsiubailo, better known by his call sign, Da Vinci, and Mr. Filimonov, his friend, were called on to fend off a Russian advance on the northern flank of Bakhmut that threatened the only asphalt road into the city.
They successfully beat back the Russian troops, clearing three tree lines. When Mr. Filimonov’s unit became pinned down by Russian fire, he said, Da Vinci stormed another tree line and saved them.
Three days later, Da Vinci was killed by shrapnel from a missile strike. “It’s hard to overcome the losses. And there are brigades with horrible losses,” Filimonov said. But even he agreed that it appeared the Wagner effort to take Bakhmut had stalled.
The question now is what the Ukrainians can do with the decline in Wagner’s fighting power. The Ukrainians are aware of weakness in the Russian lines but it will take more men and vehicles to turn this lull into a successful counter-offensive. Hopefully we’ll see that happen sometime next month.
