Russian offensive expending ‘enormous resources for marginal gains,’ US says
Mike Brest
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Russia’s military suffered more than 100,000 casualties in its battle for Bakhmut during the last roughly five months of fighting, according to a U.S. National Security Council official.
This latest casualty tally provides a stark picture of the overwhelming toll their inability to capture the strategically insignificant eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut has taken on the Russian Armed Forces.
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“Just since December, we estimated that Russia has suffered more than 100,000 casualties, including over 20,000 killed in action, nearly half of whom were Wagner soldiers, the majority of whom were Russian convicts that were thrown into combat embarking without sufficient combat or combat training,” National Security Council coordinator John Kirby told reporters on Monday. “The bottom line is that Russians attempted offensive has backfired. After months of fighting and extraordinary losses, Russia continues to be focused on a single Ukrainian city with limited strategic value. Ukraine’s armed forces are defending the territory bravely and effectively and making Russia expend enormous resources for marginal gains.”
His comments come as Ukraine is expected to launch its highly anticipated counteroffensive, where they will look to retake Russian-occupied territories mainly in the southern and eastern parts of the country. Ukraine’s Western allies have provided its military with billions of dollars of ammunition, air defense systems, and armored vehicles, among many other systems, while also training them on the more sophisticated weapons.
Over the course of the winter and dating back to the fall, much of the front lines of the war were around the tiny city of Bakhmut, which is in the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine that has largely been contested Ukrainian territory since 2014. Russian forces refocused their effort on capturing the Donbas when they retreated from their initial plan to capture the capital of Kyiv and oust the government.
“First, Russia has attempted an offensive in the Donabs, largely through Bakhmut, [and] has failed,” Kirby added. “Last December, Russia initiated broad operations across multiple lines of effort. … Most of these efforts have stalled and failed. Russia had been unable to seize any real strategically significant territory. Second, the only area where Russia has made some incremental gains, and I want to focus on the word incremental, is in Bakhmut. And that really holds as we’ve said before, very little strategic value for Russia to capture Bakhmut would absolutely not alter the course of the war in Russia’s favor.”
Much of the fighting in Bakhmut on the Russian side has been conducted by the Wagner Group, a Russian paramilitary group led by its founder Yevgeny Prigozhin. He capitalized on previous failures from the Russian armed forces and his troops took the lead in the battle for Bakhmut, though he has faced scrutiny for disappointing results and has accused the defense ministry of withholding resources from his troops. They, at various points during the war, have turned to Russian prisons for recruits to join the war.
Ukraine’s defense minister, Oleksii Reznikov, said on national television on Monday that the military was “reaching the finish line” in preparing for their highly anticipated counteroffensive to take back Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory and that commanders will decide “how, where, and when.”
Back in early November, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said “well over” 100,000 Russian soldiers had been killed or wounded in the war, indicating that Russia’s complete casualty total for its now 14 monthslong war could exceed 200,000. In March, Milley told lawmakers that Russian troops were “getting slaughtered” in Bakhmut.
Kirby declined to say what Ukraine’s casualty counts looked like, a long-standing administration policy. “We wouldn’t speak to their casualty rates or their other losses. That’s up to them to speak to. I’m not ever going to put anything out in the public domain that’s going to make their job harder. They are the victims here. Russia is the aggressor. And I’m simply not going to put information in the public domain that’s going to, again, make it any harder for the Ukrainians.”
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Despite the high casualty figures for the Russians, Gen. Christopher Cavoli, the commander of U.S. European Command, told lawmakers on the House Armed Services Committee last week that “Much of the Russian military has not been affected negatively by this conflict.”
“The Russian ground force has been degenerated somewhat by this conflict, although it is bigger today than it was at the beginning of the conflict,” he said. “The air force has lost very little. They’ve lost 80 planes — they have another 1,000 fighters and fighter-bombers. The navy has lost one ship.”