Russia's losses in the Wagner coup and what it has revealed about its armed forces

@DefAviation ES 6·24·2023 · 22:36 0

At this time, it seems that the coup launched by the Wagner Group in Russia could have stopped their advance towards Moscow.

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At 19:29 CET, the head of the Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, posted a message on his channel from Telegram announcing: "They wanted to dissolve the Wagner PMC. We left on June 23 in a march for justice. In one day, we marched just under 200 km from Moscow. During that time, we have not shed a single drop of blood of our fighters Now the time has come when blood can be shed, so, realizing all responsibility for the fact that Russian blood will be shed in one side, we are turning our columns around and setting off in the opposite direction of the camps, according to plan" (according to the translation published by Euromaidan Press).

This evening at 19:10 CET the official Belarusian news agency Belta announced that Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko "had talks with the head of Wagner PMC, Yevgeny Prigozhin". About the talks, the aforementioned agency states: "As a result, they reached agreements on the inadmissibility of unleashing a bloody massacre on the territory of Russia. Yevgeny Prigozhin accepted the proposal of the President of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, to stop the movement of armed people from the Wagner company in Russia and take additional measures to reduce tensions."

The news from Belta, which echoes information sent by the press service of the President of Belarus, adds: "At the moment, there is an absolutely profitable and acceptable option on the table to solve the situation, with security guarantees for the fighters of Wagner's PMC. As previously reported, also today, the President of Belarus held two meetings with the country's power bloc on this situation". About the agreements reached, all kinds of rumors are circulating.

There is one aspect of what has happened in the last 24 hours that is of considerable interest from a military point of view: what the coup has revealed about the state of the Russian armed forces. First of all, what Prigozhin claims that Russian blood has not been shed is false.. The independent website Oryxspioenkop.com has published the losses on both sides in this brief coup (these are graphically documented losses):

Russian armed forces:

• An Ilyushin Il-22M command aircraft (destroyed).
• A Mil Mi-8 transport helicopter (destroyed).
• Three Mil Mi-8MTPR-1 electronic warfare helicopters (destroyed).
• A Mil Mi-35M attack helicopter (destroyed).
• A Kamov Ka-52 Alligator attack helicopter (destroyed).
• A KamAZ-435029 Patrol-A armored car (captured).
• A Tigr-M tactical vehicle (captured).

Wagner Group:

• A vehicle UAZ-23632-148-64 (destroyed).

Of course, in those seven aircraft destroyed, it is most likely that all the crew members died , since both the Il-22M and the helicopters do not have ejection seats. To this must be added the human casualties in the combats that have taken place between mercenaries from the Wagner Group, on the one hand, and Russian soldiers and Chechen militiamen, on the other.

On the other hand, one of the details that have attracted the most attention in this coup is the different means that have been seen on each side. The Wagner Group has had the help of tanks in its assault on the city of Rostov, something that may have surprised many but is nothing new. Oryxspioenkop has pointed out this afternoon, in fact, that "Wagner operates a fair chunk of Russia’s most modern tanks, including the T-80BVM and T-90M."

However, the Russian armed forces have deployed BTR-80 8x8 wheeled vehicles and other armored vehicles in some cities, but tanks have hardly been seen. In fact, pro-government forces have begun digging ditches on roads and also have placed hundreds of civilian trucks as barriers to try to stop the advance of the Wagner's mercenaries. Considering that the center of power of one of the main world powers is in Moscow, such precarious means of defending the Russian capital are very shocking.

One of the obvious reasons for putting up those obstacles would have been to buy time, but by doing so, the Russian armed forces were conveying their refusal to send forces to Rostov to put down Wagner's rebellion and were merely putting themselves at the defensive. There could be two big reasons for this. The first is that Prigozhin has many friends among the top brass of the Russian armed forces, in the GRU (Russia's military intelligence service) and in the FSB (the federal security service, successor to the famous KGB). Taking into account those links that Wagner's boss has been creating for years, surely in the Kremlin they would not know which senior military commanders they could trust.

Second, the high losses suffered by Russia in Ukraine have considerably reduced the resources of the Russian army, also in the units stationed around the city of Moscow. Let us remember that Russian losses have been enormous for some time in relation to the number of tanks they had before the invasion. Russia is unable to replace these losses and has therefore had to resort to obsolete tanks, such as the T-62 and T-54/55.

The terrible state of the Russian army is evidenced by the fact that an army of mercenaries can reach a distance of 200 km from Moscow in 24 hours, something that until now no army has achieved in such a short time. a short time, not even the Germans in the 20th century. It is painful to see a great power bleeding to death from infighting between the mafia clans surrounding Putin, but this coup has conveyed an even worse image: of a Russia with an armed forces exhausted by the invasion of Ukraine and they are incapable of guaranteeing their own internal security.

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Main photo: STRINGER/AFP. Un tanque T-80 del Grupo Wagner en Rostov.