Bodies as bullets
“Keep going until you’re killed.” That’s what Andrei Medvedev recalls being told by his commanders at the Wagner Group, a private Russian mercenary army that recruits people like him out of prison to wage the Kremlin’s war of aggression against Ukraine.
Medvedev is unusual in that he not only lived to tell the tale but somehow escaped to Norway. Most others in his situation aren’t so lucky. As the war approaches its first anniversary, increasing numbers of Russians in Ukraine—both regular soldiers and Wagner mercenaries—are being treated by their superiors as “cannon fodder.”
Barely trained and often badly armed, they’re ordered to throw themselves at the more hardened Ukrainian defenders in a cynical tactic based on overwhelming the enemy with sheer numbers.
Another name for this approach is “human-wave attacks.” They’ve been a tragically recurring feature of modern warcraft—from the trenches of World War I to the Soviet onslaught against the Finns and Germans in World War II, from the Chinese assaults on South Korean and American troops in the Korean War to the Iranian charges against the Iraqis in the 1980s.
For attackers and defenders alike, these waves represent unfathomable horror.
“They were like a tide, ceaselessly crashing on the shore, one after another,” a South Korean veteran later said about a Chinese human-wave attack in 1951. “They had no guns, only grenades, so they needed to get within 25 meters of us. We were firing all the time, yet they kept coming and coming. Their faces were expressionless. The barrels of our machine guns were turning red and warping from the overheating.”
The alternative prerequisite is terror of somebody and something even worse than the enemy soldiers in front: the commanders in the rear who gave the order. One consistent element in human-wave attacks is that the superiors who seal the boys’ fates make clear that turning around during the assault will lead to an even more certain and more gruesome death.
What are the Russians hoping to achieve? Their cannon-fodder strategy on the Ukrainian front, in places like Bakhmut and elsewhere, appears aimed at wearing out the more determined but less numerous Ukrainians, while keeping the Kremlin’s crack units in reserve for a breakthrough, should that opportunity arise.
Obviously, this tactic implies a mind-boggling callousness and cynicism on the part of the Russian command. That includes everybody from the army’s top brass to Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Putin confidante who founded and runs the Wagner Group, and their common warlord, Russian President Vladimir Putin.
These men have not only been waging a genocidal war against Ukrainian civilians. They’ve also been sacrificing the youth of their own country— many drafted from ethnic minorities in remote regions or plucked by Prigozhin right out of prisons.
There are no reliable numbers. But American officials estimate that the Russians have already lost about 200,000 dead or wounded in the war, with the rate accelerating to several hundreds every day.
“The Chinese treated their soldiers as bullets, not as humans,” that South Korean veteran recalled. We could say the same today about Putin.