Lini NATO uliwauliza wakakwambia Urusi ana nguvu? Natamani watu wawe wanakuja na reasoning kama hii ya jamaa aliyeweka mambo logically kwamba kama Urusi imetumia muda mwingi kwa eneo dogo kama hilo, je kwa eneo kubwa zaidi itakuwaje? Hiyo ndo logic. Siyo mtu anakuja na ushabiki tu ambao hatuwezi kupima physically wala logically!
Na huo mji, warusi wameuawa kama kuku hadi kiongozi wa Wagner kutamka wazi kuwa wapiganaji wake wameisha, waliosalia anataka wakapumzike, na majeshi ya Urusi yakachukue nafasi zao.
Haya hapa ni maelezo ya kundi la wapiganaji Warusi waliopo Ukraine wanaotaka kumwondoa Putin. Jana wamefanikiwa kuingia Urusi, na kushambulia.
For months Ukrainian commanders in charge of troops on the ground, and the troops themselves, have scratched their heads over why Russia was prepared to invest so much material, and spend so many Russian lives, on trying to capture a town that has no obvious tactical, let alone strategic, value.
Wagner, and whoever is paying the company’s bills, were profligate with its people.
In December, a member of the International Legion of Defense of Ukraine, fighting in a group of about a dozen men to the south of the town, called from the front line.
“It’s incredible,” he told me. “Those Wagner guys come in waves of, like, 40 at a time. We kill 35. Five get into a trench or a house, then they send another 40 and we shoot another 35 or so. We’re just cutting them down like grass.”
It was assumed the “musicians,” as pro-Russian groups like to call the mercenaries, were largely prisoners. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the company, likes to call them “recidivists.” These convict recruits, some of them facing long sentences, were offered freedom if they survived six months at the front.
Clearly many did not. Instead, they were thrown into what both sides call the “meat grinder.”
“They’re coming at us all the time. We don’t know why they value Bakhmut so much but we know where they are and we know where to kill them,” said a brigade commander at the end of last year.