In its war with Russia – started in February 2022 as a result of President Vladimir Putin’s aggression – Ukraine eventually proved able to invade and hold Russian territory. This obviously has caused Putin to be displeased with his military commanders as the conflict now approaches the three year mark. This is especially so since Putin anticipated Ukrainian forces would simply roll over when Russia invaded.
During the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln famously fired five generals for their lack of initiative in taking the war to the enemy before finally finding one to lead the North to victory. Putin has outdone Lincoln, demonstrating his frustration by having dismissed at least eight senior military commanders, ending their careers.
Putin fired his first general three months into the war for failing to capture Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city. That same month he fired his Black Sea Fleet commander after Ukraine – which has no navy to speak of – sank that fleet’s flagship, the cruiser Moskva. The firings continued – one occurring in February 2023 after a failed Russian offensive to take the Ukrainian coal-mining city of Vuhledar, which Moscow claimed beforehand would swing the war in its favor. Not only did Russia fail to do so, the three-week battle saw Russian tanks running over Russian troops.
This war has come at a high cost in human lives to both sides. As of December 2024, Ukraine admits to losing 43,000 men with another 370,000 wounded. But Russia, at 198,000 killed in action, has paid an even higher price, averaging losses of more than 4-to-1 compared to the Ukrainians. Another 550,000 Russians have been wounded.
While Russia obviously has a much larger population of young men to press into military service than does Ukraine, nonetheless, Putin realizes the Russian people have a breaking point at which the losses become so widespread that they will trigger public opposition to the war. He lacks the option the old Soviet Union had while fighting in Afghanistan (1979-1989) of quietly shipping its wounded off to hospitals located within its Warsaw Pact allies so as to limit drawing attention from the local Soviet population.
But due to its high casualty rate against Ukraine, Russia has now embarked upon a tactic that can only be described as a “cannon fodder” policy in facing enemy fire. It puts the burden of the fight upon the shoulders of those least qualified to carry it out but also those who are deemed most expendable by Moscow. Derived from the term “fodder” – which is food for livestock – these low-level fighters are the metaphorical “food” for enemy cannon fire.
After experiencing setbacks by Ukrainian forces, the Russians have been making creeping advances to regain their territory and continue the invasion by expanding the army in a way not necessitating any further mobilization to do so.
The Russians began doing something in 2023 reminiscent of the 1967 film “The Dirty Dozen.” Taking place during World War II, the movie involved a titular military unit of 12 convicts trained as commandos for a suicide mission against the Germans. These convicts volunteered to go on the mission, knowing it could be suicidal. While the film was obviously fictional, what the Russians are doing now is reality. Convicts, either voluntarily or involuntarily pressed to join the army and who are ill-trained, are formed into assault units then sent on suicide missions to conduct frontal attacks against defended Ukrainian positions.
The trigger for this approach was the Battle of Bakhmut in late 2022/early 2023 in which Russian convicts, who were pardoned if they fought in the conflict as mercenaries, were formed into the Wagner Group. As one researcher shared, Bakhmut effectively “became a test bed for Russian forces to determine how best to exploit convicts as an expendable force.” He also noted that “Wagner’s methods were brutal and coercive, but effective. The Russian military was interested in the latter and less concerned with the former.”
Wagner Group eventually succeeded in helping to capture Bakhmut in May 2023. It is believed the Russians suffered as many as 100,000 killed or wounded in the battle with Wagner suffering 88% of the casualties. But the mercenary group left its footprint on the war today by the “Wagnerization” of Russia’s military.
Wagnerizing its forces has enabled Russia to engage in dozens of pitched battles across hundreds of miles of the Ukrainian front. Ukraine attempts to counter by employing cheap drones, armed with explosives, on suicide runs.
An expendable foreign resource Russia employs that, tragically, is considered expendable by its own leadership is the estimated 12,000 soldiers sent to fight in Ukraine by North Korean despot Kim Jong-un.
Ill-trained, these forces should be nowhere near a battlefield, yet Kim has effectively brainwashed them into dying for him. Thousands of North Koreans have already done so.
An established Kim family tradition for almost eight decades has been its total disregard for the lives of its own citizenry. This is evidenced by an estimated democide statistic of more than 1.6 million just through 1997. While his father and grandfather ruled the country during that time, the current Kim will lose no sleep over the lives being lost by his military today.
The use of convicts as fighters is not a new concept to Russia – during World War II it employed penal battalions for dangerous missions. But Wagner was ruthless in the tactics it adopted to enforce discipline among its criminals – tactics that “depended on simplicity and severe punishment to enforce compliance.” The toll paid by those who disobeyed orders was execution.
The Russians are not the only ones who, in modern warfare, have opted to use a less valued human resource to avoid heavy losses by a more valuable one. During the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988), to save their seasoned troops from having to attack through live minefields protecting Iraqi defensive positions, the Iranians recruited their own children – some as young as 9 – to race across these fields, detonating mines, and thus clearing a path for Iranian infantry soldiers to follow through safely. Beforehand, the children were given plastic keys to open the doors of paradise, assured “they would go directly to heaven if they died as martyrs against the Iraqi enemy.”
Any enemy embracing their own people as expendable poses an ultimate threat to the West. It should tell us as well we should not abandon Ukraine in its fight against Russia.
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