““Now we’re fighting a conventional Russian army, but before Bakhmut fell, the Wagner group was in the area, and they had a particularly terrible approach to this. The group sent forward unarmed men, mostly prisoners, with ammunition for the next group who were experienced mercenaries. They thus used the prisoners as a meat transport machine for ammunition and equipment,” says Mathew, a medic with Ukraine’s Third Assault Brigade. He took The Daily Beast in his ambulance to watch them picking up soldiers like ‘Cossack’ from the front line and delivering them to hospitals for emergency treatment. This approach, they say, was uncomfortably effective. “They had no fear” he says, because the consequences of retreat were “certain death”
Michael Kofman of the Center for Naval Analysis told The Daily Beast: “Wagner troops were better motivated, but in the Stalinist tradition that in Wagner it took more courage to retreat than to attack”—knowing they would be shot at any sign of retreat. He notes that they also had “a significant artillery advantage provided by the Russian military (hence Prigozhin’s endless arguments for more munitions), having their flanks secured by the Russian airborne, and a large supply of expendable fighters from the Russian prison system,” all of which are lacked by the current Russian forces. He also points out that “Wagner had not been used, or set up, as a defensive force in this war and so it is unclear how they would have performed on the defense around Bakhmut’s flanks.”
Since Wagner vanished, Matthew says the quality of the Russian soldiers has declined and the men are more likely to flee or let their lines break under pressure. “The ones we meet don’t even pick up their dead,” he said.”
…
““The counteroffensive is going well,” he says, but what he fears most is a longer war. “Everyone who wanted to fight signed up long ago,” he says from a café in the city of Slovyansk. “If the Russians wanted to, they have millions of men they can mobilize. We are at our total limit.””
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ukrainian-soldiers-wagner-implosion-allowed-084143479.html