“Moscow lost over 50 thousand men”

Rome, 17 April 2023 – La Russia sends its men to their deaths in a war that shouldn’t have started, it seems strange to remember that the first to accuse the Kremlin of a meat grinder strategyas a Russian-language service from the BBC and the Russian site Mediazona has now done, was Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagne Groupr. “Shoigu killed thousands of the most ready Russian soldiers in the first days of the war”, claimed Putin’s rebellious chef when with his mercenary militias he was conquering places like Popasna, Bakhmut, Soledar, and where he himself was accused of sending men to massacre against the Ukrainian trenches.

Moscow lost more than 50 thousand men

Now the BBC and Mediazona also give the numbers for this nineteenth-century strategy, defined as “meat grinder”, in which the soldier is used as a pawn who had to advance anyway and always: Moscow lost over 50 thousand men in Ukraine, and perhaps more, sent to attack like waves, and as soon as they died, they were immediately replaced by the following one. The joint research was completed on April 7, 2024 and is based on official press releases, press and social media reports and also visits to cemeteries.

Kiev and Moscow do not provide official data on losses

And although bulletins from Kiev and Moscow regularly arrive on social media about how many soldiers the enemies have lost, neither Ukraine nor Russia have ever published official reports of losses since the start of the war. Only Kiev had spoken at the end of February of 31,000 of its soldiers dead, while the Russians have never addressed the burning issue of their military losses. Dmitri Peskov, Kremlin spokesman, has always hidden behind the “state secrets law”. And in the absence of official estimates, unverified numbers began to emerge: in August the New York Times, citing US officials, had indicated the Russian military losses at 120,000. The following January, British Defense Minister James Heappey had estimated the number of Russian soldiers killed was 350,000 or injured.

How long does a recruit live at the front

The research focused, also to simplify the study, on the fate of Russian prisoners recruited to fight on the front, a practice begun with the Wagners and then copied by the Kremlin. Since the conflict began, tens of thousands of prisoners have been conscripted into Russian prisons to fight in Ukraine in exchange for the promise of release. Not a big deal for them given that data on a sample of over 1,000 prisoners showed that half of the Russian army’s recruits would die two months later having been sent to the front, while the Wagner paramilitaries succeeded to survive about a month longer. The most famous were the “punishment battalions”, mainly composed of indicted prisoners or soldiers, sent to massacre in the most ferocious clashes.