With the end of the siege of Avadiivka, the Russian army naturally entered the stage of clearing the city.
How to clean up the urban area?
First of all, Avadiivka is a fortress operated by the Ukrainian army for a long time, and it has a large number of remaining fortifications, which the Russian army must clean up after occupying the city, repair and transform it for its own use.
In this process, the Russian army needs to capture and clean up the equipment, ammunition, and materials left by the Ukrainian army, and at the same time clear the threats such as mines and materials.
Of course, as the Russian army clears the city, the remaining Ukrainian troops will also be killed or captured.
What we especially want to know is the number of Ukrainian soldiers captured by the Russian army, because the so-called results of killing and wounding in the war are mostly estimated, and they will be mixed with different degrees of propaganda. Only the number of prisoners is not good and fake, and one can be caught.
And when Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu inspected the central cluster, the commander of the cluster, Mordvichev, said that 200 Ukrainian troops have been captured so far, and according to battlefield information, another 100 are planned to be cleared out in the next few days.
It can be seen that the Russian army was able to capture about 200 to 300 prisoners at the end of the siege of Avadiivka.
What does the capture of two or three hundred captives mean in the Russian-Ukrainian war? Let's talk about this topic specifically.
In the Russian-Ukrainian war, one of the reasons why we have a relatively high evaluation of the combat effectiveness of the two armies is that the soldiers on both sides are relatively tenacious in their will to fight and are often able to fight until the last moment.
Even if they are captured or surrendered, they usually reach the point of exhaustion, and even those who refuse to be captured and die together or commit suicide are not a few.
In terms of the actual war of two years, the two armies participated in the war with more than one million troops, and their respective ** reached six figures, but there was only one case of large-scale and organized surrender, that is, the battle of Mariupol.
Mariupol, with a pre-war population of 500,000, is not only the largest city in the Ukrainian-controlled Donbas region, but also the largest city that has changed hands through fierce fighting since the start of the war between Russia and Ukraine.
Because the Russian army surrounded the city at the beginning of the war, the Battle of Macheng was also the only annihilation battle in the entire Russian-Ukrainian war in which the enemy was annihilated in a whole system.
And in the war of annihilation, there is a greater chance of capturing a large number of prisoners.
In early April 2022, the Russian side said that 267 people from the 503rd Marine Battalion of the Ukrainian Army in Mariupol had surrendered; Soon after, after the failure of the 36th Marine Brigade to break through at the command level, the remaining 1026 people also surrendered to the Russian army.
By April 21, the Russian army had forced all the remaining Ukrainian troops into the Azovstal steel plant, in addition to the above two surrendered Ukrainian troops, plus the scattered captured Ukrainian troops during the period, at this time the Russian army captured a total of 1,478 Ukrainian troops in Macheng.
A month later, the battle for Mariupol finally came to an end with the surrender of 2,439 people in the Azovstal plant, mainly with the Azov regiment as the main body.
If we simply add it up, 1478 people + 2439 people, it is 3917 people; If you add the small number of Ukrainian troops who fought sporadically and cleaned up the captured Ukrainian troops in the city after April 21, then the total number of Ukrainian troops captured and surrendered by the Russian army in the Battle of Macheng is about 4,000.
Note that this is the largest group of prisoners on both sides in a single battle in the entire Russian-Ukrainian war so far.
In the series of fierce battles that followed, most of the prisoners existed as individuals, at most a dozen people, and few were captured and surrendered in formation.
We have seen that the data of dozens or even hundreds of people mentioned in the regular exchange of prisoners between the Russian and Ukrainian armies is actually the total number of prisoners in multiple combat points on the whole front in a certain period of time.
Of course, because the Russian army has 4,000 prisoners in Mariupol, plus many Ukrainian troops were captured in the raid stage at the beginning of the war, it has more money in its hands.
As for the number and proportion of prisoners in normal battles, we can use the Wagner Group's record statistics as a reference.
Wagner detailed statistics on the number of kills and prisoners killed and captured by the group participating in the war in Ukraine from March 2022 to May 2023, of which the number of kills reached 72,095, while the number of prisoners was only 509, and the ratio of prisoners to prisoners reached an astonishing 141:1.
This is equivalent to the Wagner Group killing all a company of the Ukrainian army in the operation, so that one Ukrainian soldier can be captured.
Of course, Wagner's own soldiers were not treated very kindly on the part of the Ukrainian army after they were captured, so it was also important for the group not to take prisoners in the final phase of the operation.
But even if this factor is excluded, it will not be easy to easily capture the prisoners of the Ukrainian army.
Especially in the large-scale positional warfare between Russia and Ukraine, the two sides mainly rely on artillery and drones to kill and injure each other remotely, and there are not many opportunities for close combat, and it is not easy to withdraw after capturing the opponent's soldiers.
And in the Russian-Ukrainian war, even if it is an "obvious victory", it is not a siege and annihilation battle like Mariupol, at most it is just a rout battle.
Since the encirclement could not be formed, and the pursuit could not be taken advantage of, the capture of a large number of prisoners was impossible.
In the case of the Ukrainian army, in the half year from the beginning of August 2023 to the beginning of February 2024 (including the peak period of the big **), only 543 Russian prisoners were saved for exchange on the whole line.
And in the entire war, the number of prisoners exchanged by the Ukrainian army (3,135 people) is not as good as the number of prisoners captured by the Russian army in the battle of Macheng.
Looking back at the situation in Avadiivka, the Ukrainian army deployed more than 10 unsatisfactory brigades in the entire theater of operations, but most of the brigades are not in urban areas.
By the time the battle was fought in February, the 110th Mechanized Infantry Brigade and the 3rd Azov Brigade were mainly in the urban area, of which the 3rd Azov Brigade was mainly in the coking plant, and the 110th Mechanized Infantry Brigade was in the main urban area.
The Russian siege directly cut off the connection between the coking plant and the main city, and the 110th Mechanized Infantry Brigade in the city finally collapsed after months of hard fighting due to the difficulty of importing foreign reinforcements.
In fact, the ministry had already retreated to the west before Syrsky's formal order, and the order for the commander to withdraw his troops was actually just an acknowledgment and redemption of the established facts.
Since the withdrawal was not organized, the 110th Mechanized Infantry Brigade did not have time to inform the various departments in the city, so it left the city in the darkness of the night with an infantry formation. In the process, it was hit intensively by Russian aerial bombs, and there were heavy losses.
The main force of the 3rd Azov Brigade is at the coking plant, with a strong position in front and the 47th Mechanized Infantry Brigade as a backup. But it also ran away, allowing the Russian army to take control of the entire city of Avadiivka in a very short time.
We have previously said that the indicator of whether the Ukrainian army has organized a retreat is whether it can rely on the coking plant and the high-level area to hold on for a certain time, but the fact is that each runs its own way.
Will the Ukrainian army be able to run away?Yes.
Because even in the direction of the main city, it is not surrounded on all sides, as in Mariupol, and the positions of the 53rd Mechanized Infantry Brigade outside the city have not collapsed;As for the coking plant, it is not even possible to talk about encircling it on three sides, and the rear is the deep position of two or three brigades of the Ukrainian army, which is relatively easier to run.
But can they all run away?No.
Those who were killed on the way, and who died in the fierce fighting in the city, apparently did not escape, and the last two or three hundred captives remained.
Two or three hundred prisoners, of course, is not much, but it is the largest number of prisoners taken by the two armies in a single combat site in a very short period of several days after the battle of Mariupol.
Some netizens think that the Ukrainian army retreated unscathed, but the aerial bomb exploded in the infantry group, wasn't it the Ukrainian soldiers? Isn't it the Ukrainian army soldier who is lying in the city of Avadiivka? These captured by the Russian army, aren't they Ukrainian soldiers?
Indeed, in addition to those who were killed, killed, and captured, the rest of the Ukrainian troops did retreat in their entirety, but the question is that the Ukrainian troops who were killed and captured will be expelled from the "Ukrainian nationality"?
You know, people are really fighting for Ukraine, it's a genuine Ukrainian army, why are these real Ukrainian troops kicked away by these goods on the Internet who don't even know that Ukraine is in **, in order to win?
This is inappropriate.
And objectively speaking, like the 110th Mechanized Infantry Brigade, which suffered the heaviest losses this time, it is actually interesting enough. Continuously carrying the Russian army to attack in the main city, ** is getting bigger and bigger, and the supplement is getting less and less, and the final collapse is really powerless.
Of course, even Ukraine's ** Zelensky recently said that the number of Ukrainian soldiers killed in the two-year war was only 31,000, and the dead outside of this number were also expelled from the "Ukrainian", and we can't say what happened to those netizens on the Internet.
It's just that the number of casualties is so much, and if the battle loss ratio is extremely cheap, and they are all won, then what kind of soldiers are you in a hurry to recruit?