It’s no secret the regular Russian army is in a state of collapse after losing around 100,000 soldiers killed and wounded in Ukraine since late February. A power vacuum is forming around the Kremlin. A vacuum that The Wagner Group clearly intends to fill.
Six weeks after the Ukrainian army launched twin counteroffensives in northeastern and southern Ukraine, Russian forces all across the country are digging in—and bracing for the next attack.
There’s only one place in Ukraine where the Russians still are on the offensive. The area around Bakhmut, a town in the center of a cursed rectangle formed by occupied Donetsk, Luhansk and Severodonetsk and the free city of Slovyansk in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region.
Only it’s not really the Russian army that’s still mounting attacks toward Bakhmut, it’s the armies of the pro-Russian separatist “republics” in Donetsk and Luhansk and, more notably, The Wagner Group, the notorious and shadowy Russian mercenary firm whose for-profit soldiers have been on the front lines since the beginning.
Today thousands of Wagner mercenaries are in Ukraine.
The operations by The Wagner Group and the Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics are small in scale.
