Institute for the Study of War and
the Critical Threats Project 2023
Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, February 9, 2023
Karolina Hird, Riley Bailey, George Barros, Nicole Wolkov, and Frederick W. Kagan
February 9, 7:30 pm ET
Click here to see ISW’s interactive map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This map is
updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.
Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin announced on February 9 that the Wagner
Group has entirely stopped recruiting prisoners. In a response to a press comment, Prigozhin
claimed that Wagner’s recruitment of prisoners has "completely stopped" and that "all obligations are
being fulfilled" for those currently under Wagner’s employ.
Prigozhin also absurdly claimed that over
10 million Americans have applied to join Wagner.
The Wagner Group will likely continue to recruit
from prisons, albeit in a much more limited capacity. As ISW has previously noted, Wagner’s
recruitment of prisoners has slowed over the last few months, an assessment confirmed by statistics by
the Federal Penitentiary Service that show that decreases in the Russian prison population stabilized
between November 2022 and January 2023.
This phenomenon is consistent with the overall trend of
conventional Russian troops slowly replacing the Wagner Group around Bakhmut, indicating that
Russian military command may be shifting away from its reliance on Wagner and therefore on using
prisoners as cannon fodder.
The Kremlin continues to pursue measures to gradually prepare Russia’s defense-
industrial base for a protracted war in Ukraine while avoiding wider economic
mobilization. Russian President Vladimir Putin held a meeting with the Supervisory Board of the
Agency for Strategic Initiatives on February 9 and instructed the agency to support federal subjects in
developing the production of unmanned aircraft systems.
Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security
Council Dmitry Medvedev previously stated that Russian military manufacturers intend to expand the
supply of reconnaissance and attack drones to support operations in Ukraine, and Russian and Iranian
officials are reportedly planning to build a factory in Russia to manufacture 6,000 drones "in the
coming years."
Medvedev visited a tank manufacturing plant in Omsk Oblast on February 9 and stated that Russia
needs to increase the production of various armaments, including modern tanks, in response to
Western military assistance to Ukraine.
Dutch open-source group Oryx reported that Russian forces
have lost 1,012 destroyed tanks in Ukraine with an additional 546 tanks captured by Ukrainian forces.
Oryx reported that these combined losses represent roughly half the tanks that Russian forces
committed to Ukraine at the start of the invasion.
Fifteen hundred tanks are enough to equip more
than 15 tank regiments or brigades or about 150 battalion tactical groups.
The Russian military needs
to quickly replenish these tank losses to maintain the ability to conduct large-scale mechanized
maneuver warfare ahead of a likely increased pace of offensive operations in eastern Ukraine. Medvedev
likely framed his calls for increased production as a response to Western military assistance to obscure
the fact that substantial military equipment losses are driving the need for increased production. The
Kremlin’s efforts to gradually prepare Russia’s defense industrial base for a protracted war while
avoiding a wider mobilization of the Russian economy continue to be incompatible with the scale of the
war that the Russian military is fighting in Ukraine and the scale of Russian military equipment losses.
A prominent Wagner-linked Russian milblogger called for the dismissal of Russian
Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu over a Russian military uniform procurement scandal.
