All 500 original members of a Ukrainian battalion were killed or wounded in fighting with Russia, commander says

• Ukraine’s protection is being hindered by the lack of experienced troopers, The Washington Post reported.
• One commander said all 500 original members of his battalion had been killed or injured.
• Soldiers with important fight experience “are all already dead or wounded,” the commander said.

The warfare in Ukraine is bleeding either side, with every struggling more than 100,000 army casualties (killed and wounded) since Russia launched its full-scale invasion last year. But with Moscow capable of draft fighters from a inhabitants that dwarfs that of Ukraine, there’s rising concern that Kyiv is much less able to struggling sustained losses — and that this can jeopardize its skill to strike back this spring, The Washington Post reported on Monday.

The gravity of the situation is illustrated by the experience of Ukraine’s forty sixth Air Assault Brigade. A commander of a battalion within the brigade told the Post that he’d lost each one of many 500 people he commanded back in February 2022, main them to get replaced with recent recruits far much less succesful on the battlefield.

The forty sixth Air Assault Brigade is a part of the Ukrainian pressure battling Russia — and the Wagner mercenary group — over management of Bakhmut in the east of the country. In an evaluation revealed over the weekend, the Institute for the Study of War prompt that the Kremlin is utilizing Wagner’s mercenaries, some recruited from Russian prisons, as cannon fodder amid the fierce preventing in Donetsk, calculating that their lack of life is more palatable to the Russian public than the lack of standard forces.

The man who instructions the Ukrainian battalion, recognized by the Post only by his call sign, Kupol, indicated that Kyiv doesn’t have the same luxurious.

“The most valuable thing in war is combat experience,” he said, describing the distinction between a soldier with six months of experience and one who was freshly educated as “heaven and earth.”

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“And there are only a few soldiers with combat experience,” he told the Post. “Unfortunately, they are all already dead or wounded.”

In his own battalion, Kupol said there had been a complete turnover in personnel for the reason that invasion. Off the five hundred males he commanded last year, 400 have been wounded and one other 100 killed, based on the Post. Their replacements will not be prepared for warfare, he added.

“They just drop everything and run. That’s it. Do you understand why? Because the soldier doesn’t shoot. I ask him why, and he says, ‘I’m afraid of the sound of the shot.’ And for some reason, he has never thrown a grenade,” he told the Post. “We need NATO instructors in all our training centers, and our instructors need to be sent over there into the trenches. Because they failed in their task.”