• Expendable troops are crucial to Russia’s costly advance in Ukraine.

• Criminals allow Russia to expand its army without resorting to major mobilization.

• Convict troops can be more useful in urban warfare than in open terrain or mechanized warfare.

For Westerners, the solution was inhumane. To compensate for the poor performance of its troops in the first months of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia formed assault units made up of convicts and other “expendables” in 2023.

But for Vladimir Putin’s government – for which victory was all that mattered – sending waves of troops to absorb bullets has allowed the prized Russian regular units to capture more ground in Ukraine.

The laboratory for this ruthless approach came in the Battle of Bakhmut in late 2022 and early 2023, when the Wagner Group – a mercenary force – deployed assault units made up largely of imprisoned people pardoned in return for fighting in Ukraine. This approach, coupled with the carving up of territories through glide bombing, has outlasted the Wagner Group’s commitment and allowed Russian forces to conquer more land without sparking unrest at home that could threaten Putin’s rule.

“Wagner – and in some ways the Battle of Bakhmut – became a testing ground for Russian forces to figure out how best to exploit convicts as an expendable fighting force,” researcher Michael Kofman wrote in a study of Russia’s military adaptation for the Carnegie Endowment International Peace Think Tank in Washington, DC “Wagner’s methods were brutal and coercive, but effective. The Russian military was interested in the latter and less interested in the former.”

Turning criminals into soldiers is not a new idea. In the United States, judges routinely gave defendants a choice between prison time or military service (today’s U.S. military frowns on applicants with criminal records, although waivers are possible). But Russia, out of great necessity, has taken this to a new level. Having lost an estimated 700,000 soldiers to death, injury or desertion in the nearly three years since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia should resort to mass recruitment to offset its losses.

Jails and prisons provide an easy pool of expendable labor without causing discontent among the Russian public about the draft. As for criminals, the fact that many volunteer for suicide squads says a lot about the conditions in Russian prisons.

Not that Russia has ever cared much about the lives of its soldiers. During the Second World War, the Red Army often used punitive battalions, for example to clear minefields under fire. But even by those standards, Wagner was ruthless. His tactics “depended on simplicity and severe punishment to enforce compliance,” Kofman wrote. Soldiers who refused to advance or retreated without orders were simply executed.

Wagner’s war was fought cheaply. “Convict units were given cheap commercial cell phones without SIM cards,” Kofman wrote. “The phones had offline maps with numerically displayed waypoints and GPS installed. Wagner commanders ordered assault groups to advance using these preset waypoints over cheap, unencrypted radios, and convict assault groups relayed their locations using code words.”

One of the tragedies of the Ukraine war is that these tactics have some effectiveness for nations willing to treat their citizens as disposable citizens. After almost a year of bitter fighting, Bakhmut was captured in May 2023. According to the US government, Russia may have suffered up to 100,000 dead and wounded.

“The turnover ratio was favorable for Ukraine, with an average rate of one in four killed or seriously injured, with the majority of Russian casualties coming from convict formations deployed by Wagner,” Kofman wrote. “Publicly available sources indicate that convicts accounted for 88 percent of Wagner’s casualties during the Battle of Bakhmut.”

Ukrainian losses were smaller but more noticeable. “The battle drained experienced personnel on the Ukrainian side while allowing the Russian military to concentrate artillery and expendable infantry formations in a grueling battle of attrition around Bakhmut,” Kofman noted.

Ironically, while the Russian military was criticized for its rigid tactics, the Wagner convict units proved adaptable under desperate circumstances. For example, the selection of its leaders was spontaneous. “Wagner regulars determined who the best convicts were during training, and they were appointed commanders of assault groups,” Kofman wrote.

In some cases, the convict units penetrated and surrounded Ukrainian positions. In other cases, they tried to overwhelm the Ukrainians with multiple waves from different directions. By returning fire, the Ukrainians announced their positions, and repeated Wagner attacks attempted to expend their ammunition. Once the convicts had worn down the Ukrainians, Wagner’s regular (non-convict) troops would move in to do the job.

“The execution was tactically flexible, with units changing their approach depending on the conditions,” the report said. “If one position was too strong, they could switch to another.”

“The primary factors that made Wagner’s operations possible were the availability of expendable convicts from the Russian prison system, artillery support from the Russian Army that provided a fire advantage, and the presence of supporting Russian units that held Wagner’s flanks to secure their campaign.”

Wagner’s power in Russia waned after the group’s leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, died in a mysterious plane crash in 2023 after inciting a failed mutiny. Its mercenaries have found lucrative employment abroad, particularly in mineral-rich, human rights-threatened African countries whose governments need military support against Islamist groups and other insurgents.

But Wagner’s legacy lives on in what Kofman calls the “Wagnerization” of the Russian military. The Russian army now relies on Storm-Z (now Storm-V) assault units, made up of poorly trained and poorly equipped people from prisons. According to the BBC, soldiers complain that their chance of surviving the war is no more than 25%.

The question is whether the convict-soldier concept is effective. The Carnegie study suggests this is the case in some cases, particularly in urban warfare, where structures provide more cover for small units of lightly armed infantry to get within striking distance of enemy bases and tanks. But in open terrain and mechanized warfare, where tanks and other heavy weapons are needed, convict units have not fared well. Therefore, they are best suited as auxiliaries to regular troops. As Russia advanced in November, wave attacks over open terrain added to the rapidly rising death toll.

In any case, the Russian people are paying the price. Those who survive the war return to their communities as free citizens, where some former prisoners commit the same crimes – such as murder – that landed them incarcerated in the first place.

Michael Peck is a defense writer whose work has appeared in Forbes, Defense News, Foreign Policy Magazine, and other publications. He has a master’s degree in political science from Rutgers University. Keep following him X And LinkedIn.

Read the original article on Business Insider