ARTICLE
Russia’s military commanders are ‘terrified’ by Putin’s demands for new offensive on multiple fronts in Ukraine and fear ‘mass slaughter’ and ‘are giving up hope’ of winning the war, experts claim
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11689207/Russias-commanders-terrified-Putins-demands-new-offensive-fear-mass-slaughter.html
-Kremlin has now lost a staggering total of more than 175,000 troops in the war
-Putin’s demand for further assault has caused deep divisions in high command
Will Stewart
29 January 2023 06:53 EST
Russia’s top brass are ‘horrified’ at Vladimir Putin’s demand for an urgent new military offensive on multiple fronts in Ukraine, it has been claimed.
They fear more ‘slaughter’ as new analysis suggests the Kremlin has now lost a staggering total of more than 175,000 troops in the war.
Putin’s demand for his war supremo General Valery Gerasimov to unleash ‘an assault in several directions at once’ has evoked deep divisions in his high command, political analyst Valery Solovey has alleged. Dr Solovey is a former professor at Moscow’s prestigious Institute of International Relations, a training school for diplomats and spies.
He said on pro-opposition Khodorkovsky Live channel: ‘The Army General Staff is terrified by the instructions of the commander-in-chief [Putin]. I am not exaggerating. They are horrified.
‘They are afraid to lose the remaining armed forces in the slaughter that they are being dragged into by [Putin’s] order.’
Despite senior commanders giving up hope for their ‘goal of winning’ the war, they will obey Putin.
Dr Solovey said: ‘Well, they saluted - “As you wish, Your Highness, you’re the genius, you know it better than us, you started it all, and our job is to sort it out now”.
‘This [offensive] is all planned for February. And Gerasimov, a close ally of defence minister Sergei Shoigu, is the “most capable of Russian generals”.
But the top brass in the general staff ‘are afraid they won’t make it in time, because Ukraine might obtain new weapons - more dangerous, more modern, offensive [from the West].
‘That’s why now is the last chance to try to strike Ukraine, but not with the goal of winning,’ Dr Solovey said.
‘This is very important to understand. There is no [longer] such goal at all. The goal is totally different - to end it in an honourable way. That is, to achieve peace.
‘It’s about keeping a minimum of [Russian gains]. That is Donbas, a part of new territories - not all of them, and to defend Crimea. They are not expecting more.’
His analysis is far from the public position of the Kremlin which insists Putin’s military adventure is going according to plan.
This comes as Telegram channel General SVR suggests the ‘irretrievable military operational losses of manpower’ in the Russian army is more than 126,500, a rise of more than 20,000 this month.
On top of this, there have been more than 44,000 killed in pro-Kremlin private military armies operating in Ukraine to support Putin’s illegal invasion.
If true, it means more than 10,000 lost in this month’s heavy fighting in these private military companies - the best known of which is Wagner, substantially staffed by prisoners released from Russian jails to fight for Putin.
In addition, more than 6,250 Russian national guards have been slain, states the channel.
The overall toll is put at 176,863. The channel’s figures for war losses are routinely higher than other sources.
ARTICLES
1. Wagner Group Try to Treat Mercenaries With Different Dangerous Illnesses in Civil Hospital in Luhansk Oblast
Defense Express
https://en.defence-ua.com/news/wagner_group_try_to_treat_mercenaries_with_different_dangerous_illnesses_in_civil_hospital_in_luhansk_oblast-5587.html
January 29, 2023
Around 300 Wagner Group mercenaries have been taken to a hospital in the village of Yuvileine in Luhansk Oblast, but local doctors are refusing to treat Wagner Group Mercenaries hospitalized with different dangerous illnesses.
“Up to 300 mercenaries from the Wagner Group have been hospitalized in Yuvileine’s multidisciplinary hospital No.15. Doctors are refusing to treat them because many of the fighters are suffering from HIV/AIDS, syphilis, tuberculosis and pneumonia.” - informed General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
As Defense Express informed before the private Russian military company, the Wagner Group, took delivery of an arms shipment from North Korea to help bolster Russian forces in Ukraine
Wagner Private Military Company is a Russian paramilitary organization. It is variously described as a private military company (PMC), a network of mercenaries, or a de facto private army of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The group operates beyond the law in Russia, where private military contractors are officially forbidden. While the Wagner Group itself is not ideologically driven, various elements of Wagner have been linked to neo-Nazis and far-right extremists.
The group came to global prominence during the war in Donbas in Ukraine, where it aided separatist forces of the self-declared Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics from 2014 to 2015. Its contractors have reportedly taken part in various conflicts around the world—including the civil wars in Syria, Libya, the Central African Republic (CAR), and Mali, often fighting on the side of forces aligned with the Russian government. Wagner operatives have committed war crimes in areas where they are deployed. The accusations include rapes and robberies of civilians, and torturing accused deserters.
The authors of the joint investigation by NOS and Nieuwsuur claim that only in November 2022, russia imported 2 million chips, of which 60 thousand, or only 6% of the total number, are Dutch NXP and Nexperia. It’s still unknown what part of the electronics from this amount was used on production to continue the war against Ukraine, as well as what part of them was used for the production of civilian products.
Investigators are sure that the flow of electronics imports to the russian federation remains consistently high, despite Western sanctions. At the same time, the role of “intermediary” in such supplies for the Kremlin was assumed by China: they say, importers from the People’s Republic of China simply buy up all this electronics in gigantic volumes, which then “migrate” to the territory of russia. At the same time, in order to carry out the delivery covertly, the chips can go in general as “ordinary” cargo of international postal operators.
Illegal suppliers of electronics take advantage by the fact that in order to check possible circumvention of sanctions, bureaucrats have to perform several dozen checks on just one shipment in order to block it. Also, they take advantage by the fact that some of the “gaskets” may still not be on the EU sanctions list.
The experts and business representatives of the Netherlands interviewed by the NOS and Nieuwsuur investigators admit that more can be done here so that russians get less electronics for their military equipment. For example, Dutch companies can check the buyers of their goods more thoroughly. And if the “gaskets” from China violate the terms of the contracts and resell microcircuits to russia, then at least they should simply stop these contracts.
2. Russia and Ukraine Battle for Control of Villages Near the Key City of Bakhmut
NYT Story by Matthew Mpoke Bigg • 11h ago
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/29/world/europe/russia-ukraine-battle-east.html
Russian forces were wrestling for control of villages in eastern Ukraine near the beleaguered city of Bakhmut over the weekend, the latest flash point in a battle that Moscow views as crucial for its push to seize the whole of the eastern region of Donbas.
Ukraine’s general staff said on Sunday that its soldiers had repelled attacks on the small village of Blahodatne and several other settlements in the area. The statement came a day after Russia’s Wagner group, a private military company that has conducted much of the fighting around Bakhmut on Moscow’s behalf, claimed that its forces had captured Blahodatne.
“Blahodatne is under our control,” Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian businessman and the head of the Wagner group, said on Saturday in a statement posted on a website for one of his companies. Russia’s defense ministry has not confirmed the report and the claim could not be independently verified. Mr. Prigozhin has sought to cast his mercenaries as the most effective fighting force in the area and previously has claimed credit for battlefield advances ahead of Kremlin confirmation.
Blahodatne lies between Soledar, a salt-mining town that Russian forces recently captured after weeks of intense fighting, and a road that runs north from the city of Bakhmut. The road serves as a crucial supply line for Ukrainian forces defending the city.
Since the summer, Bakhmut has become a focal point of the fighting in eastern Ukraine and the target of Moscow’s most significant offensive.
Military analysts say that Moscow aims to encircle Bakhmut, cut off its supply routes and then seize it. Despite some recent success, Russia’s progress in the campaign, which began over the summer, has been grindingly slow and both sides have sustained heavy casualties in intense fighting.
But since capturing Soledar earlier this month, Russian forces have stepped up shelling of the villages just to the west of it, including Blahodatne.
Many civilians have followed a directive from the government in Kyiv to leave Donetsk, which is home to Bakhmut and one of the two regions that make up the Donbas region. Civilians who have stayed remain vulnerable to shelling and artillery attacks, with dozens killed in recent weeks. Pavlo Kyrylenko, the head of Donetsk’s military administration, said on Sunday that five civilians had been killed a day earlier in the region.
Almost a year after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, both sides are expected to launch renewed offensives in the coming months, as Kyiv puts to use the heavy weapons sent from the West and Russia deploys the huge numbers of men it drafted last year.
Amid warnings that Russian forces were regrouping for an anticipated spring offensive, Ukraine’s allies pledged new sophisticated weapons for the fight.
Germany and the United States last week announced that they would send battle tanks to Ukraine, a move that came after weeks of tense back-channel negotiations between Western officials. But it may be months before the tanks rumble across the battlefield.
Britain’s defense ministry said on Sunday that the first Ukrainian soldiers had arrived in Britain for training on the Challenger 2 tanks that were promised earlier this month.
In a speech on Saturday, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine expressed gratitude for the latest promises of military aid, but said that his country’s allies should still do more.
“Ukraine needs long-range missiles, in particular, to remove this possibility of the occupiers to place their missile launchers somewhere far from the front line and destroy Ukrainian cities with them,” he said in an overnight address.
The Kremlin has set full control of the Donbas, where it has held considerable ground since 2014, as its immediate military objective. To that end it has mobilized tens of thousands of new recruits, though it has failed to achieve sweeping territorial gains in the region in recent months.
Military authorities in Ukraine say that Moscow’s advances in the Donbas region have come at the expense of heavy casualties, not least among the ranks of the Wagner private military company.
The Institute for the Study of War, a think tank based in Washington, said in a report on Saturday that conventional Russian forces were “likely replacing exhausted” Wagner forces “to maintain the offensive in Bakhmut” after the capture of Soledar.
But Russia might be less willing to sustain heavy losses among regular conscripts than among Wagner fighters, the report said. “The Russians’ ability to execute large-scale rapid offensives on multiple axes this winter and spring is thus very questionable,” the report said.