The assault started before dawn. As Alexei and the men moved forward, the ground erupted in a wall of fire. Almost instantly, five men were mowed down by a machine gunner. A shell exploded in front of the commander, blowing him to pieces. Snipers fired on those left in the field. Alexei could hear someone yelling about his leg. He turned and saw one of his fellow-fighters writhing, his leg now a bloody stump. Another wave of men, all prisoners, were sent in as reinforcements. More fire, more explosions, more bodies. Wagner commanders sent in a third wave. A number of these fighters were equipped with rocket-propelled grenades, which they fired at the building before entering it. Alexei was among them. Inside, he saw the bodies of Ukrainian soldiers scattered on the ground.
The next day, Wagner commanders ordered Alexei and four others to storm a patch of woodland that shielded a Ukrainian bunker. When they crossed into the trees, two of them fell to the ground, picked off by snipers. Alexei dropped, too, and tried to lie as flat as he could. Bullets and grenades ripped through branches and leaves, sending splinters of wood whistling past. Alexei found himself beside another Wagner recruit, Yevgeny, who had been imprisoned for stealing a car while drunk one night. Their shoulders were touching. A bullet ripped into Yevgeny’s eye, and, for the next half hour, Alexei listened to him moan as he bled to death. Wagner continued to send waves of convict fighters, about ten at a time, a tactic that became known as a myasnoi shturm, or “meat storm.” After six hours, the woods grew quiet. Wagner had taken the bunker. The group’s commanders rewarded their men by letting them wash themselves in a nearby banya.
Alexei’s next orders were to join an assault on a Ukrainian position that had been dug into the top of a hill. He entered a stretch of forest as part of a group of Wagner fighters, looked down, and saw “a carpet of bodies,” he said. A guy next to him took a shot through the head. Tanks were firing, as was artillery, creating a wall of noise. Shrapnel from a 120-millimetre mortar sprayed into Alexei’s back, and he, along with other injured fighters, headed to an evacuation point. But, Alexei said, on the way he became separated from the rest and wandered the woods until he heard voices. They were speaking Russian. As he got closer, they switched to Ukrainian. Alexei saw their uniforms just as they drew their weapons and told him to put up his hands. In their dugout, the Ukrainian soldiers gave Alexei chocolate and cigarettes. He was surprised to see ordinary guys defending their country. He was expecting the foreign mercenaries that Prigozhin and the Wagner instructors had said were the enemy. At the detention center in Kyiv, Alexei told me, “I made a giant mistake.”
Wagner’s tactics made the group a vexing and persistent opponent on the battlefield. The Ukrainian intelligence officer, whose brigade fended off multiple Wagner assaults, described how, in situations in which regular Army units would retreat, Wagner continued its assault: “Part of the group is destroyed, others are wounded, and, instead of evacuating, the rest continue with the storm—this is completely unreasonable.” The threat of zeroing out meant that, “if they move forward, they at least have the chance to live another day,” the officer said. “If they go back, they’re dead for sure.”
Wagner had its own hierarchy. Higher-ranking commanders were situated in bunkers within radio range, often a few miles from the front, issuing orders to assault teams on the ground. Professional mercenaries were given the letter “A” and held back, entering the battle only once Ukrainian defenses had been softened. Recruited prisoners, who made up roughly eighty per cent of Wagner’s manpower, were given the letter “K” and deployed in waves, in intervals of fifteen or twenty minutes. “One group follows the other at a pre-planned distance,” the intelligence officer explained. “Even if you destroy the first, you have very little time to rest. The second is already advancing.” Moreover, the first wave was often used simply to draw fire, in order to identify Ukrainian positions, which were then targeted by artillery. “They are not bound by what is written in tactical manuals or taught in military academies,” the officer said. “Wagner is a private structure, free of any dogmas, and this makes it flexible, able to mutate on the battlefield, and, as a result, unpredictable.”
The commander of a Ukrainian drone squadron told me that, over many hours of observing Wagner from the sky, he had witnessed “not so much a lack of fear but, rather, the total devaluation of life.” In one case, he watched as Wagner fighters in a trench left a dead comrade in place for several days, cleaning their weapons, eating, and sleeping with the body lying just a few feet from them. “I kept waiting for them to bury him, or at least move him, but they just acted like nothing was the matter,” he said. Another Wagner unit took a wounded Ukrainian soldier prisoner, and then placed him on the edge of their trench, to keep Ukrainian forces from firing on them. The commander said that he watched, helpless, as the Ukrainian soldier flailed and lost blood, and finally froze to death.
When confronted by an armed drone, the commander said, “the regular Russian mobiks”—as mobilized recruits are called—“fall into hysterics, scatter in every direction, try to hide.” Radio intercepts pick up their frantic calls to higher-ups: “We are being shelled!” Wagner fighters from Russian prisons, however, often fire wildly into the air, trying to shoot down the drone. In some cases, they do manage to disable it; just as often, they stand in one place until they’re blown to pieces. “This isn’t bravery,” the drone commander said, “but complete craziness.”
Wagner’s use of human-wave attacks led to some limited battlefield successes. In January, Wagner captured Soledar, a small town north of Bakhmut known for its salt mines. “I want to confirm the complete liberation and cleansing of the territory of Soledar from units of the Ukrainian Army,” Prigozhin declared. “The whole city is littered with the corpses of Ukrainian soldiers.”
The place had little strategic import for the larger Russian campaign, but it was the country’s clearest military achievement in more than half a year. At first, the Defense Ministry praised Russian paratroopers for taking Soledar, with no mention of Wagner. Prigozhin alleged that Russian generals were attempting to “steal victory.” The Defense Ministry released a new statement, clarifying that the “direct assault on the residential areas of Soledar” was “successfully carried out thanks to the courageous and selfless actions of the volunteers of Wagner’s assault squads.”
When Russia launched its invasion, Andrey Medvedev assumed that he would be called up to fight. He was twenty-five years old and had spent much of his childhood in an orphanage in the Siberian city of Tomsk. As a teen-age conscript, he spent a year in the airborne infantry, an experience that had soured him on the Russian Army. He had heard about Wagner, which not only paid better but was also supposedly run more efficiently and rationally. “The Defense Ministry will screw you over,” he recalled thinking. “Wagner is run by more reliable people.”
Medvedev had spent years after his service bouncing between odd jobs—security guard, construction worker, driver—and had done a stint in prison. “I didn’t have shit,” he told me. “No home, no family, nothing.” He largely believed the propaganda he saw on television: Nazis in Ukraine were committing atrocities against a population that yearned to be liberated by Russia. He called Wagner’s recruitment hotline, in the summer of 2022. After two weeks at the base in Molkino, he was given his assignment: commander of the 1st Squad of the 4th Platoon of the 7th Assault Detachment.
Medvedev was sent to a position outside of Bakhmut, where he had ten Wagner fighters under his command—recently enlisted mercenaries, not prisoners. In one of their first assaults, he and one other member of his unit made it out unscathed. The rest were badly injured or killed. Afterward, a higher-ranking Wagner commander told him to expect some “fucking great reinforcements.” Medvedev asked whom he meant. “Killers,” the commander said.
Soon, a group of convicts arrived, many of whom appeared old and physically unwell. Medvedev described an episode in which he and his new recruits were pinned in a trench, taking heavy fire from Ukrainian soldiers. “The guys climbed in and just sat there,” he told me. Medvedev yelled at the convict soldiers, “The enemy is about to hop in this trench and start fucking shit up. What are you going to do then?” A handful of Wagner mercenaries with combat experience repelled the attack, but the episode rattled Medvedev. “There were some decent fighters,” he said, “but the majority had no clue what they were doing.” A couple of weeks of training, he said, “were barely enough to learn how to hold a machine gun and walk straight.”
One of the recruits was a convicted murderer in his mid-fifties named Yevgeny Nuzhin. Medvedev described how, at one point, their unit came under heavy fire, and everyone dispersed into the trees. Nuzhin came back without his rifle, having thrown it off in a panic. They found it lying in the shrubs. Later, the unit had to cross a clearing in range of Ukrainian artillery. Rounds were exploding around them, but Nuzhin was so winded that he could barely walk. He had lost his gun again. Medvedev ran up to him in a fury. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” he demanded.