Putin inventing “new type of military” after Ukraine liquidated almost his entire army
The helmet of a Russian soldier at the ruins of the vocational training center in Makiivka, in which Russia housed the mobilized, and which was destroyed by an attack by the Armed Forces of Ukraine (Photo:REUTERS/Alexander Ermochenko)
Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has begun to invent a new type of military because his entire army has nearly been liquidated by the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Ivan Kyrychevsky, an expert writing for the Ukrainian Defense Express military news outlet, said in an interview with Radio NV on Feb. 3.
“If you do even a certain simple calculation, it turns out that during the year of hostilities, the Armed Forces of Ukraine had disposed of almost the entire conventional army of the Russian Federation,” he stated.
"That is, professionally trained, contract workers who served for several years, practiced offensive tasks. It is worth noting that the airborne assault troops of the Russian army, which were intended as almost the main shock fist in operations of any type, were almost completely eliminated.”
Kyrychevsky noted that since the personnel of the Russian army is “almost completely depleted”, the Putin regime “has to invent a new type of soldier who will serve.”
“If before that it was personnel who served professionally, now the average military man is either a “Wagnerite” (member of the Wagner mercenary group) or a covertly mobilized ‘Cossack’ who was previously trained under the system of the so-called combat army reserve,” the expert said.
As of Feb. 3, according to the General Staff, the Armed Forces of Ukraine have eliminated almost 130,000 Russian soldiers, including 840 during the past 24 hours.
According to the U.S. newspaper The New York Times, since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Russian army has lost up to 200,000 servicemembers, both killed and wounded.
According to Olga Romanova, head of the non-governmental organization Russia Behind Bars, only 10,000 out of the 50,000 Russian prisoners recruited by Kremlin’s Wagner Group to participate in a full-scale war against Ukraine have continued to serve, while the rest were killed, wounded, missing, surrendered, or deserted.
Meanwhile, according to presidential advisor Mykhailo Podolyak, the Wagner mercenaries press-ganged 38,244 prisoners in order to use them in the full-scale war against Ukraine. As of mid-January, 29,543 of them had already been neutralized.
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