Meat Part 3, “Plagiarism is the Sincerest Form of Flattery”

30 Minute Read

I left off in my last article on Meat describing how the Russian Wagner Group instituted what amounted to WW2-era style penal units of disposable assault troops using volunteers recruited from the Russian prison system, tasked to perform ultra-dangerous attacks against prepared Ukrainian defenses, missions where the odds of survival were low, but that was okay because the convict Meat were not valuable and were easily replaced.

Crazy enough, despite their well-known casualty rates and the overt brutal level of military discipline imposed on them, with summary executions as the penalty for nearly every infraction, the Wagner prison recruitment effort was extremely successful, with up to 50,000 convicts having signed up.

Where this story takes a crazier turn is that Wagner’s convict scheme worked so well, the Russian Ministry of Defense copied it and then stole it from Wagner!

Storm-Z, Not as Cool as it Sounds

About the same time Wagner was battling it out in Bakhmut primarily relying on convict Meat, the Russian MOD was adopting a similar policy of recruiting convicts for short-term contracts in the “SMO” to serve as assault troops. Thus, Storm-Z was born. And shortly thereafter, Wagner was banned from recruiting convicts.

Those were dedicated assault units built into every combined arms army/army corps, staffed with convict volunteers and military malcontents (deserters, drunks, thieves, etc), but with professional leadership. With about a hundred men per Storm-Z detachment (roughly company-sized), they were further broken down into four assault groups (roughly platoon-sized), each with an assault squad and a fire support squad. Assault groups were meant to be attached to other Russian tactical units; regardless of the branch of service, if a Russian combat maneuver unit was conducting assault operations, they’d be assigned Storm-Z detachments to perform the dirty work.

Storm-Z Meat went on to perform similar missions as the convicts in Wagner, plus some more. Reminiscent of WW2-era Penal units, during the Ukrainian 2023 Counteroffensive, Storm-Z assault groups were even used sacrificially to defend forward positions in the Russian defense-in-depth. Just like Red Army penal units defending the first lines at Kursk in 1943 were meant to absorb German fires and the first wave of an offensive, so too were Russian Storm-Z stationed on the front lines in Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk Oblasts meant to eat the initial assaults of the upcoming AFU offensive that started in June 2023.

Sometime in 2023 or as late as early 2024, Storm-Z was supposedly replaced by Storm-V. Besides detachments being a tiny bit bigger, I’ve not found any other changes to the organization or mission, other than that the incentive of short-term contracts was removed. It’s very possible that it was just a rebranding effort by the MOD to distance itself from the negativity surrounding the Storm-Z name.

Where Have all the Bad Men Gone?

Wagner and Russian MOD Storm-Z/V differed in quite a few ways, one was the length of service of their convict contracts.

For background, when Putin enacted the September 2022 “Partial Mobilization,” the Russian Armed Forces adopted a “Stop Loss” type policy for nearly everyone, which meant everyone serving in Ukraine would do so indefinitely. But Wagner Group convict contracts were for six months, then pardoned, to either accept a discharge to reenter civilian society as a free man, or they could join a better Wagner unit with more pay, better treatment, etc.

When the Russian Armed Forces fully usurped the convict recruitment program, they reportedly extended the term of service for convict volunteers from six months to one year, and then at some point, potentially during the Storm-V rebranding, they extended convict service indefinitely. Promising a pardon upon honorable discharge for “the end of the war, loss of health or reaching the age limit.”

Why no more discharges? As a guess, too many convicts were being lost, they couldn’t afford to lose more through discharges. Though I can imagine the discharge policy was also viewed as unfair to non-convict Russian troops, who were already serving indefinitely regardless of the risks. Why should convicts be given discharges when they weren’t?

Overall, how did the convicts fare in terms of survivability? Open-source casualty tracking of public death notices in Russian social media suggests that convicts made up the bulk of reported Russian military casualties in late 2022 and throughout 2023, but those numbers dropped significantly in 2024. That’s interesting. I wonder what triggered that?

Did the Russian government institute a crackdown on the issuing of death notices on social media?

Did field commanders within the Russian Armed Forces reevaluate the value they placed on the lives of their convict soldiers and decide they weren’t Meat?

Did the Russians figure out a more successful assault tactic that took far fewer casualties despite a dramatic increase in the operational tempo of their strategic offensive throughout 2024?

I’m not buying any of those explanations. Most likely, Russia’s source for convict volunteers dried up, the Russian Federation has a limited population of prison manpower who were capable enough to serve and motivated too. Like the use of L/DNR before, it was time to find a new source for Meat.

“Superfluous People”

Do the Russians still rely on Meat? Reports from the front from Ukrainian and Russian sources both suggest they are. But if they’re not relying on mobilized L/DNR or convicts anymore, at least in large numbers, then which poor bastards have the honor now to serve as Russia’s primary source of expendable manpower?

Amazingly, the Russians seemed to have chosen random Contraknik volunteers as their newest source of cannon fodder.

Recently, Alexander Borodai, a serving member of the Russian Duma (their parliament) who was also very active in the politics and military operations during the Donbas War, had a leaked conversation divulged where he was caught discussing the new source of expendable troops:

They’re seen as second-rate infantry. In reality, they’re positioned on the front lines as defensive units, set to hold the line. Their real task is to draw attention and exhaust enemy forces as much as possible while others in the rear prepare for the main offensive. Just wear them down, you understand? No one expects these forces to achieve some fucking incredible—or even small—victory. They’re simply cannon fodder.

Okay, nothing controversial so far, Borodai isn’t saying anything I’ve not said myself. But he goes on:

Essentially, they’re Landsknechts mercenaries, yes. Volunteers for pay…This infantry, you understand, is made up of people who aren’t seen as particularly valuable. Or valuable at all…there’s a term for this, you know, introduced by Maxim Gorky and widely used in various philosophies and stuff—“spare people.” [Borodai is misquoting Gorky, who called them “Superfluous People”].

Yikes. In essence, powerless and disadvantaged Russians enlisting for the financial incentives are viewed by the Russian public as mercenaries, who know the risks when they signed the contract, so society doesn’t care about them.

Back in the day when I was in the Marine Corps, there was a punchline delivered whenever someone complained about doing anything unappealing, “USMC stands for U Signed the Motherfucking Contract.” Ergo, don’t bitch for doing a job you volunteered to do. That seems to doubly apply to those who volunteer to join the Russian Armed Forces to fight in Ukraine, especially those who take the extra bonus to become a Shturmoviki, aka Stormtrooper, aka assault infantryman-sapper, aka Meat.

In Fall 2024, a Pro-Putin Russian journalist corroborated Borodai’s comments when she described the extremely short careers of three typical Russian volunteers who went missing in action within a few short weeks of signing their contracts with the Russian Armed Forces. She was clearly not happy discovering the Russians had found their new source of cannon fodder.

And yet miraculously, despite their heavy losses, like the convicts, the “Superfluous” Contrakniks keep volunteering. Are they serving in Storm-Z/V detachments along with the dregs? Are they serving in dedicated Reconnaissance and Assault Units? I’m not sure, it’s hard knowing the details of the Russian order of battle from the outside, but wherever they are serving, for the time being Russian Meat is still on the menu.

The Ukrainian Meat-Flavored Substitute

As of yet, I’ve ranted and raved at length about the Russian use of expendable troops. Those who are Pro-Ukrainian probably greatly enjoyed that, but now I’m going to piss in their Cheerios. Because fair is fair, and the Russians weren’t the only ones to use expendable troops in this war.

There is a branch of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, the Territorial Defense Forces (TDF), who can best be described as the “red-headed step-children” of the AFU. Conceived as an organized national militia of motivated amateurs, by law and doctrine, they were intended to defend Ukraine against a full-scale invasion by either forming an insurgency if an invading army won, or otherwise performing rear area security functions. They were never intended to be used on the front lines of a conventional meatgrinder war, not being organized, trained, or equipped for that role.

And yet out of a self-imposed necessity, the TDF was used extensively as just another conventional ground combat maneuver force, often finding themselves at the very tip of the spear holding key areas in the hottest and most critical strategic sectors of the front, despite a lack of training, equipment, and leadership competent in that style of warfare.

Scratch that. The TDF wasn’t treated as just another conventional ground combat maneuver force. They were treated as Meat. And that’s not me making that distinction. For some extremely strange and grotesque reason, the Ukrainian leadership and their talking heads seem to take joy in declaring that TDF units are cannon fodder, where they are deliberately placed on the front lines of the hottest sectors specifically to preserve the better-quality AFU forces during high-intensity defensive battles.

Does that sound familiar? It should, that’s exactly how the Russians used their Storm-Z to defend the forward positions against the Ukrainians’ 2023 Counteroffensive. How the Red Army used their penal battalions in Kursk 1943.

The first time I encountered this was during the Russian Spring-Summer 2022 Donbas Offensive, where on multiple occasions I heard or read of a common talking point emerging, that the TDF was being used to defend the Donbas to preserve the better AFU units for a later counteroffensive. Such as at the 48:00 mark in this podcast episode.

That near identical talking point was later repeated in the early winter of 2023 after the Ukrainian government doubled down on “Bakhmut Holds” despite the worsening tactical situation and the competing need to prepare for the upcoming large-scale counteroffensive, when they began telling Western media that they were conserving their better troops and instead deliberately using their TDF, foreign volunteer troops from the International Legion of the TDF, and their National Guard to defend Bakhmut, meaning those were expendable.

That’s pretty screwed up. But the craziest part of these claims is that they weren’t even true. The reality was that the Ukrainians were using their better forces to defend the Donbas in 2022 and Bakhmut in 2023, who suffered very heavy losses. But in their hopes to deflect against that embarrassing fact, the Ukrainians were bragging about relying on cannon fodder when they weren’t.

Even the professional military analyst Mike Kofman, whom I’m a big fan of, got duped into repeating that talking point too about Ukraine preserving its best units by using cannon fodder to defend Bakhmut. But then he visited Bakhmut himself and talked to the AFU units defending it, he came back with a different story: the Ukrainians had “accepted an attritional fight where they are trading better manpower, better people, for manpower that Russia can easily replace.”

Bragging about using Meat when you’re not is like bragging that you have genital herpes when you don’t.

Mutinies of the Damned

I truly wish the claims of using expendable troops by the Ukrainians were all just unfounded episodes of braggadocio to cover up excess losses in conventional units. But unfortunately, the AFU did embrace the use of Meat, though never to the degree and scale as the Russians.

Starting at the height of the 2022 Russian Donbas Offensive to the present, there have been endless reports of AFU units struggling in hot sectors of the front, predominantly TDF units, though not always. And not surprisingly, those episodes have led to resentment from the soldiers with increased discipline issues, including regular mutinies.

We’re not talking about service-wide WW1 French Army Mutiny type problems, these were platoon or company-sized mutinies, with the ring leaders even going so far as to video-record collective speeches to post onto social media, to justify their decisions to refuse to follow orders, citing their desires for their conditions to improve, wanting their incompetent commander relieved of duty, asking to be rotated off the lines for a break, complaining that they are not properly equipped or supplied, and altogether suggesting they were being set up for failure by their chains of command. One such example involved a TDF unit in May 2022 that claimed, among other things, that they were “being sent to certain death.”

That sort of claim was hardly rare. The rate of Ukrainian disciplinary problems resulting from refusals to fight and outright mutinies had skyrocketed in mid-2022 to such a degree that in late-2022 the Ukrainian government was forced to pass a law increasing punishments for violations of military discipline. Despite that, the number of troops openly complaining or even refusing to perform their military duties has increased, with incidents like this one, and this one, and this one, and this one. Ex Cetera. Those weren’t isolated incidents, many Ukrainian soldiers believed they were being treated unnecessarily callously by their leadership and acted out as a result. Made easier by belonging to a society more open to criticism than the Russians, and rather lax military discipline, where even mutiny didn’t come with stiff official penalties.

But stiffer unofficial penalties for mutinying were on the table. Like the Russians, the Ukrainians seemed to adopt a policy of assigning their malcontents to assault units. For example, reports have described brave, veteran AFU soldier who after mutinying over spats with incompetent leadership, were sent to the assault companies of other brigades as a punitive measure.

Penal units in all but name…

Pixelated Meat

It wasn’t just social media accounts from disgruntled soldiers mutinying that proved the Ukrainians were using Meat, they had some unfortunate episodes where it became big news.

For example, in April 2024, the nationalistic Right Sector-aligned leadership of the 67th Mechanized Brigade was broken up by the AFU Commander-in-Chief, not the least bit for protecting its politically aligned “elite” volunteer troops at the expense of their allotment of mobilized “Mobik” troops.

Nicknamed “Pixels” due to the pixelated camouflage patterns of their AFU-issued uniforms, as opposed to the MultiCam camo patterns worn by the Right Sector volunteers, the Mobiks assigned to the 67th were placed into their own rifle infantry battalions and deliberately assigned the most dangerous tasks, specifically defending forward positions as cannon fodder while the Right Sector volunteer units of the 67th were kept safely in the rear.

Though the 67th’s leadership were punished, the crackdown against them was primarily triggered when Pixel Meat, manning a critical section of the frontline, were broken through by a Russian attack, resulting in a tactical disaster at the fortress city sector of Chasiv Yar in the Donbas. If not for that, I seriously doubt the AFU senior leadership would have intervened, as they haven’t otherwise.

Speaking of Penal Units…

I briefly hinted in Part 2 of my Meat series that the Wagner Group’s leader ‎Prigozhin might have had inspiration besides from WW2 for his convict recruitment scheme. I say that because Wagner wasn’t the first organization to enlist convicts as combatants, that award goes to the Ukrainians

"Ukrainians with real combat experience will be released from custody and will be able to compensate for their guilt in the hottest spots." - Zelensky, Feb 28, 2022

When I read that the first time, I noticed something about that quote that seemed familiar. Then I remembered why:

“Form within each Front from one up to three penal battalions…and put them on more difficult sectors of the front to give them an opportunity to redeem by blood their crimes against the Motherland.” - Stalin Order 227, July 28, 1942

Here we have Zelensky’s speech writer paraphrasing Stalin’s famous “Not a Step Back” Order, which created the use of penal units. Was it an accident or on purpose? Does it matter?

Alas, that early-war convict volunteer program did not seem to go anywhere. But in May 2024, along with other legislative reforms of its mobilization system, Ukraine passed a law allowing prisoners to volunteer. Where would they serve once they enlisted? What job would they perform?

“Under the new law, prisoners qualified to join the amnesty program can be assigned only to assault brigades.”

While it seems some of those thousands of volunteer convicts were destined to serve in mixed assault units, convict volunteers and others alike, while other convicts ended up in all-convict assault units, like that within the 24th Mechanized Brigade. Just like Wagner and Storm-Z.

Regardless of the type of assault unit, mixed or all-convict, the reading of the law itself demonstrates they’re meant to serve in the most dangerous of assignments, as assault infantry. Ergo, Meat for Cannons.

Old-er Man’s War

There is something that’s bugging me greatly about one of the choices Ukraine made to mobilize manpower. And it’s personal too.

Once upon a time, I was a young 18-year-old infantryman, who did that job till I was 30 years old. And now I’m a rather broken-down 45-year-old. I know full well just from personal experience what it takes to do that job, and what being older means.

So how the Fucking Shit is 45 years old the average of the Ukrainian Armed Forces?

And to average 45 means many more are over. The Pro-Ukraine military analyst Rob Lee had this to say on the matter:

"Of about 30 infantry troops in a unit, said the deputy commander of the 72nd brigade, on average half were in their mid-40s, only five were under 30 and the rest were 50 or older.”

Shockingly, that is a deliberate decision. Despite millennia of history demonstrating who makes the best soldiers, the AFU predominantly relies on old men with little to no military experience, totally physically unsuitable for military service, given the barest of basic training, who often end up as infantrymen. Why is that?

To quote Valerii “The Iron General” Zaluzhny:

“We need Ukraine to exist in 20 or 30 years. That future lies with them - those who are 18 now. They are a completely different generation who will save this country.”

Truthfully, Ukrainian demographics do trend higher for men 30 years or older. And so the Ukrainian leadership, with the stamp of approval by their society, decided to shield the youth of Ukraine from war despite the disgusting ramifications, that their old men are expendable.

There are more of them and they possess less value to Ukrainian society than younger men, so it’s their duty to serve and die so the young can be protected. That is the literal definition of cannon fodder.

“Are We the Baddies?”

Already I pissed in the Cheerios of the Pro-Ukrainians, now I’m about to take a shit in it. Because I need to get something off my chest.

I will openly admit I’m biased about the Russo-Ukraine War. I fully acknowledge the illegality of the invasion, the overt Russian naked imperialism and aggression, the brutality brought to the Ukrainian people. More so, I’m a Gen X American military veteran raised on 80s-era movies where the Russkies were always the Bad Guys and they will always remain so in my brain regardless of what happens in the future.

Consequently, I will always inherently expect the Russians to act badly, to not value human life, and to make cruel decisions. Like using expendable troops in warfare. The Russians are using Meat? After initially getting over the realization that this is happening again, in the 21st Century, it’s not that shocking that Putin’s Russia is taking such measures. After all, water is wet.

But weren’t the Ukrainians supposed to be the Good Guys?

Aren’t they the Pro-West liberal democracy that values human life? Aren’t they Basically NATO™?

I expected better from Ukraine. While I certainly view their use of Meat as far less wasteful and cruel than the Russians, nevertheless, it’s repellent. They shouldn’t be doing it, and they definitely shouldn’t be gleefully bragging about it.

More so, it was unnecessary. And that is where it hits the hardest. Neither side needed to use Meat, they did so because it was cheaper than the alternative.

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Stay tuned to the last article in my Meat series, where I provide my closing thoughts and analysis, including the deeper political reasoning behind why both sides chose to use expendable troops.

(Note, in this article, I didn’t tackle the North Koreans or the use of female convicts, which both sides are doing, as this article was already too long)