Wounded Russians Are Limping Into Battle On Crutches

Despite losing more than 800,000 troops killed and wounded in the first three years of its wider war on Ukraine, the Russian military has still managed to sustain a front-line force of no fewer than 600,000 troops in Ukraine and western Russia. That’s enough people to give Russian field armies a manpower edge over Ukrainian forces in all of the most important sectors of the wider war.

But that doesn’t mean the Kremlin isn’t struggling to generate fresh troops. At least one desperate Russian command, the 20th Combined Arms Army, has formed assault groups made up of walking wounded—including injured men walking with the aid of crutches—and sent them into battle with predictably tragic results.

There were rumors several months ago that some Russian commanders were ordering wounded men back into action. Perhaps the first clear evidence of the “crutch battalions” appeared on social media last week. A Ukrainian drone spotted a Russian assault group largely made up of men on crutches limping into position to attack Ukrainian positions around Pokrovsk, a fortress city in eastern Ukraine that’s the current locus of the Russian war effort in the east.

Bomb-dropping drones made quick work of the attackers, ruthlessly slaughtering them despite their injuries and their obviously limited offensive potential.

What may at first have seemed like an anomaly—a bizarre waste of lives potentially ordered by one cruel Russian commander—now seems more systemic. On or just before Tuesday, a Russian soldier from the 20th CAA recorded a video of walking wounded assembling for an assault in the forests apparently outside Pokrovsk. “Man is using crutches for a mission,” the soldier mused in the video, helpfully translated by Estonian analyst WarTranslated. “What the fuck?”

The proliferation of crutch battalions across at least one front of Russia’s war on Ukraine belies the huge size of the Russian force in Ukraine. Yes, there are 600,000 Russians in eastern and southern Ukraine as well as around the small salient Ukrainian troops occupy in western Russia’s Kursk Oblast. No, not all of those 600,000 troops are truly fit for combat.

The stress on the Kremlin’s manpower system is only growing as the expansion of the Ukrainian drone corps, and Russia’s loss of 15,000 combat vehicles, compels Russian commanders to hold back their few surviving modern tanks and fighting vehicles and send in the infantry, instead—on foot and often without a lot of support.

Infantry-first assaults work. Individual soldiers spread out on rough terrain are harder targets for Ukraine’s ever-present drones than mechanized groups with big, easy-to-spot tanks and fighting vehicles.

“Every single time” Russian regiments attempt a vehicle assault, “the result is zero,” one Russian blogger lamented recently in a missive translated by WarTranslated. But “infantry, with the support of artillery and drones, slowly but surely take tree line after tree line.”

The cost to the infantry is staggering, however. Daily Russian casualties have spiked as Russian doctrine has evolved to favor infantry over vehicles. According to Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, the top Ukrainian commander, Russia suffered 434,000 casualties including 150,000 dead in 2024. That’s more killed and injured Russian troops than in the previous two years combined.

Ukrainian losses are much lower: 43,000 killed and 370,000 injured in total since February 2022, Ukrainian Pres. Volodymyr Zelensky said in December.

Attacking with infantry rather than vehicles leverages a Russian asset—sheer manpower—but risks squandering that asset for the relatively modest territorial gains the Russians have registered in the last year.

People are a renewable resource, but not quickly or easily renewable. That more Russians are limping into battle on crutches is a clear sign the Kremlin is expending its human resources faster than it’s renewing them.