"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," researcher Michael Kofman wrote in a of Russian military adaptation for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think tank in Washington, D.C. "Wagner's methods were brutal and coercive, but effective. The Russian military was interested in the latter and less concerned with the former."
Wagner warfare was waged on the cheap. "Convict units were given cheap commercial cell phones without SIM cards," wrote Kofman. "The phones had offline maps installed with numerically indicated waypoints and GPS. Wagner commanders would order assault groups to move forward with these preset waypoints over cheap, unencrypted radios, and the convict assault groups would pass back the information without secure channels."
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