Russia uses expendable 'troops' to make progress in Ukraine

 Business Insider:

To Westerners, the solution was inhuman. To compensate for the dismal performance of its troops in the early months of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia formed assault units of convicts and other "expendables" in 2023.

But for Vladimir Putin's government — to whom only victory mattered — sending waves of troops meant to absorb bullets has enabled more valued Russian regulars to seize more ground from Ukraine.

The laboratory for this ruthless approach came at the Battle of Bakhmut in late 2022 and early 2023, when the Wagner Group — a mercenary outfit — employed assault units consisting mostly of imprisoned people who were pardoned in return for fighting in Ukraine. This approach, combined with area battering of glide-bombing, has outlasted Wagner Group's involvement, allowing Russian forces to seize more land without triggering the unrest back home that could threaten Putin's rule.

"Wagner — and the battle for Bakhmut, to some extent — became a test bed for Russian forces to determine how best to exploit convicts as an expendable force," the researcher Michael Kofman wrote in a study of Russian military adaptation for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think tank in Washington, DC. "Wagner's methods were brutal and coercive, but effective. The Russian military was interested in the latter and less concerned with the former."

Turning criminals into soldiers isn't a new idea. Judges in America routinely offered defendants a choice between going to jail or going into the service (today's US military frowns on applicants with criminal records, though waivers are possible). But Russia has taken this to a new level out of deep need. After losing an estimated 700,000 troops to death, injury, or desertion in the nearly three years since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia should be resorting to mass conscription to replace its losses.

Prisons and jails provide an easy pool of expendable manpower without sparking popular discontent among the Russian public over the draft. As for the criminals, the fact that many volunteer for suicide squads says much about conditions in Russian prisons.
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Russia's way of war is to use former prisoners as cannon fodder on the front while other troops then seized the ground.  It is a very cynical approach to warfare.  It is not like Russia is defending the homeland.  This is a war of aggression.  It is a war in which Russia is having a much more difficult time than it anticipated.  Russia initially thought the war would be over in a matter of days if not weeks that is dragging on into years.