The OSCE reported the death of about 30,000 Russian soldiers near Bakhmut

Since May, the Russian regular army and private military company Wagner have lost between 20,000 and 30,000 soldiers killed and wounded trying to capture Bakhmut, said Ian Stubbs, senior military adviser to the British delegation to the OSCE.

“It’s a huge death toll with a total advance of about 25 kilometers,” he told the Vienna Security Forum, noting that this way “For every kilometer traveled, more than 800 Russian soldiers are killed or wounded, most of them Wagner mercenaries.”

PMC owner Yevgeny Prigozhin is finding it increasingly difficult to fill the ranks of what he called a “meat grinder” in eastern Ukraine, Stubbs said. Previously The “Wagnerites” opened more than 40 centers for recruiting fighters for the war throughout Russia. In addition, universities began to recruit “volunteers”. According to Stubbs, these initiatives will not compensate for the losses, and the Polish Military Contingent will not be able to maintain the intensity of the offensive in Ukraine.

He noted that in addition to this, Russia lost a large number of heavy armored vehicles and was forced to deploy 60-year-old T-62 tanks to the front. According to OSCE estimates, from summer 2022 from storage About 800 of these machines were removed. And recently, BTR-50 armored personnel carriers were discovered in Ukraine – a rare equipment that was adopted by the army in 1954.

“Russian military leadership is strikingly incompetent and squandering strategic resources in the name of small tactical victories,” Stubbs concluded.

Separately, he noted that Russia is running out of missiles, as evidenced by the increasingly longer intervals with which its army strikes Ukraine’s critical infrastructure.

Stubbs added that the next-generation weapons that the Russian leadership, including President Vladimir Putin, boast about has turned out to be a fiction that they are afraid to send to the front. “The truth is that the highly touted next-generation Russian T14 Armata MBT turned out to be a “white elephant” that barely makes it to the parade, let alone fights in Ukraine. And the Russian Air Force is so distrustful of fifth-generation Su-57 multi-role aircraft that it hesitates to use them over Ukraine,” he explained.

According to the American Institute for the Study of War (ISW), from January 31 to February 28, the Russian army was able to increase the number of territories captured in Ukraine by less than 0.04% (234 sqm kilometers). NATO sources recordedthat for every Ukrainian soldier killed at Bakhmut, there are at least five Russian soldiers.