KYIV, Ukraine — Ukrainian officials said on Tuesday that the Wagner group had shifted to using more professional soldiers in the battle for Bakhmut as its supply of prisoner recruits has dwindled, suggesting that Ukraine may be hoping its battle in the city can severely damage a highly effective fighting force for Russia.
“This is their last shot,” Col. Serhiy Cherevaty, a spokesman for Ukraine’s eastern group of forces, told Radio Liberty in an interview, referring to the Wagner group.
The mercenary force has helped Russia make crawling advances toward Bakhmut largely by relying on prisoners as essentially disposable manpower. Of the prisoner brigades, Colonel Cherevaty said, “almost all of them have been killed there” in Bakhmut, leading Wagner to shift toward using more former Russian special forces recruited into the private military company.
Wagner’s founder, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, has been in a public battle with Russia’s Defense Ministry, and has said he has not been allowed to recruit more prisoners recently, even though those recruits are thought to have been so important to Wagner’s success in Bakhmut. Mr. Prigozhin — who has criticized Russia’s military leadership as woefully ineffective — has publicly questioned whether that decision to cut off the supply of prisoners is intentional to destroy Wagner’s “offensive potential.”
The comments by Colonel Cherevaty come as some analysts question whether Ukraine should continue to expend so many resources in the withering battle to try to hold on to Bakhmut.
The assessments shed new light on a prolonged battle that top Ukrainian officials say they will continue to fight, even as Russian forces surround the city from three directions and both sides suffer enormous casualties. If Ukraine can eliminate Russia’s limited supply of prisoner soldiers fighting in the Wagner paramilitary group in Bakhmut, analysts say, they will not have to face them again elsewhere.
“Russian convict recruits suitable for combat is not limitless and the permanent elimination of tens of thousands of them in Bakhmut means that they will not be available for more important fights,” according to the Institute for the Study of War, a research group in Washington.
The group echoed Ukraine’s assessment that Wagner units were shifting away from brigades of former prisoners after they endured staggering losses.
“Russian forces near Bakhmut have recently changed tactics and committed higher-quality special forces,” the group said. “The Wagner Group is still likely using prisoners to support operations in Bakhmut, albeit to a much more limited extent than in previous months” because of high losses in its waves of frontal assaults.
Yet Mr. Prigozhin has justified his group’s brutal tactics in Bakhmut by flipping this logic, highlighting a parallel struggle to shape the legacy of the protracted battle. Mr. Prigozhin and his allies claim that Wagner’s main task in Bakhmut is not territorial gain, but the depletion of experienced Ukrainian units that could have been fighting in other sections of the 600-mile front line.
“The Ukrainian forces send all their combat-ready units to Bakhmut,” Mr. Prigozhin said in late January. Wagner “destroys them, creating operational opportunities in other areas,” he added.
As an example, some pro-war Russian military bloggers said the intensification of the Bakhmut battle had coincided with the end of Ukrainian advances in the Kreminna area further north, where Kremlin’s forces have regained initiative in recent weeks. Some Western analysts have echoed this point, saying the fighting in Bakhmut is sapping Ukrainian strength before an expected major counteroffensive.
“The tenacious defense of Bakhmut achieved a great deal, expending Russian manpower and ammunition. But strategies can reach points of diminishing returns,” Michael Kofman, a Washington-based expert on the Russian military at the Center for Naval Analyses wrote on Twitter on Monday after visiting the Bakhmut area. “This fight doesn’t play to Ukraine’s advantages as a force.”
Russia’s defense minister, Sergei K. Shoigu, said on Tuesday that the fight for Bakhmut was “ongoing,” and emphasized the importance of the battle for the Russian side. “This city is an important hub for the defense of Ukrainian troops in the Donbas,” he said. “Taking it under control would allow further offensives deep in the defense of the Ukrainian armed forces.”
Anatoly Kurmanaev and Ivan Nechepurenko contributed reporting.
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