Wall Street Journal: Ukraine Sent Untrained Conscripts to Bakhmut “Meat Grinder”

According to the American newspaper, this is how the Ukrainian leadership “saved” trained soldiers in preparation for the spring offensive.

Kiev deployed untrained and ill-equipped troops in the losing battle for the strategically important Bakhmut to save better units for a planned counterattack, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported. The newspaper published a lengthy report in which it told the story of a group of 16 Ukrainian conscripts, who were sent to fight for the city in February.

Many of the soldiers in question were unemployed

According to the WSJ, the Ukrainian army recruited them from villages in the northeastern Kharkiv region. Some had completed their mandatory military service years or decades ago, but almost none had ever seen actual combat.

According to the report, the men spent just two nights at a base where they were given outdated Soviet-era equipment. After that, they were told that they were being sent to Bakhmut. Some of the conscripts wanted to sign a formal refusal to carry out the order, saying they were not properly trained for the job.

One of them recalled that he complained that he had never held a gun before and that he was afraid, but the Ukrainian staff sergeant simply told him that

Bakhmut will teach you”.

The 16 conscripts, assigned to the 5th Company of the Ukrainian 93rd Mechanized Brigade, spent just 36 hours in Bakhmut, during which time 11 were killed or captured, the WSJ reports, citing surviving soldiers and relatives of the slain recruits. One soldier recalled how it felt to fire a missile receiver for the first time in his life, while another spoke of how the Russian attack was “hell on earth.”

According to the Wall Street Journal’s suggestion, Kiev sent mobilized soldiers and territorial defense units to the Bakhmut “meat grinder” in order to

retain the brigades trained and equipped by the West for the spring offensive.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the private military company Wagner, previously said that his men destroyed 50,000 soldiers of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and wounded another 50,000-70,000 soldiers.

***