Orcs’ Meat Wave Offensive: Avdiivka and Lyman-Kupyansk sector

October 20, 2023April 20, 2026

Last night, under cover of darkness, someone looking like putin arrived in Rostov and headed straight to the military district headquarters — the place where combat operations get planned. But in this case, it wasn’t some inspection of readiness or a planning meeting. No, it was a proper ass-chewing for the russian generals. They got all the meat and iron they begged for, yet somehow there’s still no result.

What the enemy is demonstrating right now on the eastern flank isn’t some local distraction to pull our reserves. This is a full-scale meat wave offensive aimed at breaking through the front line near Avdiivka and along the Lyman-Kupyansk sector. So we are far past the “diversionary maneuver” stage, because a diversion should bring minimal losses but maximum noise. What we see here is the opposite: the enemy bleeds at a scale that leaves no doubt about their intent.

As you can see, the parameters and structure of enemy losses show that they really did throw themselves into a desperate offensive and hurled massive forces at it. In plain terms, they burned through their reserves to achieve specific objectives.

Daily enemy casualties in personnel — killed alone — are already triple their average level before the offensive started. Back in September and summer, it was around 450 black bags, give or take. But according to the General Staff report above, in the past 24 hours the enemy left 1,380 bodies on the battlefield. And “left on the battlefield” is the operative phrase, because that’s exactly what’s happening:

That’s the drone view. But there’s also footage from our guys’ cameras when they move into enemy positions a bit later. Those videos confirm plenty of times that the enemy abandons their dead and wounded on the field.

The Wagner Playbook, Recycled

We can’t guarantee the enemy returned to Bakhmut tactics, but some frontline reports say the pattern looks very similar. Here’s a quick reminder of how Wagner operated: their fighters had a caste system. The lowest caste went forward with broken weapons or none at all. Because their purpose wasn’t to fight. The whole point of that wave was to reveal our firing positions. Naturally, our machine gunners started mowing them down, the enemy mapped those positions, and then artillery struck them.

Only after that — over their own corpses and wounded screaming under their boots — would the armed and equipped assault troops advance. Eventually our guys adapted to this tactic and found methods to reduce the effectiveness of enemy attacks and, accordingly, increase their losses.

And now, on certain sections of the front, roughly the same thing is repeating. So far there haven’t been reports of unarmed Orcs being driven forward. But we’re definitely seeing meat wave offensive again — waves meant to expose our firing positions and die. You can tell immediately: zero artillery prep before the assault, zero armored support.

The enemy is saving shells and armor for the second wave of stormtroopers, once they’ve mapped out where our firing points are. But there’s other evidence too — after one meat wave, a second and third can follow, with the exact same absence of armor and artillery.

Nobody Will Report Up the Chain

In other places, the opposite — the enemy tries throwing forward armored groups of up to ten vehicles. A couple tanks, the rest BMPs, BMDs, or BTRs loaded with infantry. They push forward, run into fire, lose two or three machines, then roll back to their positions. The armored group gets reconstituted, and after some time the enemy advances again with the same forces as a couple hours ago — same ten vehicles. And this repeats several times a day. It’s entirely possible that eventually this unit runs out of armor, but the attack order wasn’t canceled because of that — so the infantry just goes forward without armor.

You can assume the commander of such a unit doesn’t dare report that continuing the attack is impossible. He already lost the attached armored group, and a pure infantry assault across open ground won’t produce results but will cause massive casualties. The commander understands he’ll be punished for failing to preserve the armor. So he reports that the offensive continues but delivers little success so far. Because it’s easier to send a hundred soldiers to their deaths than admit he lost equipment with zero results.

Something that goes beyond a feat

Confirmation of these conclusions comes from that same daily General Staff report. According to this data, the enemy lost 55 tanks in 24 hours. In other words, the enemy lost a tank battalion in one day. Besides tanks, during these 24 hours the enemy lost 120 units of various types of armored fighting vehicles — so altogether 175 units of different types of armored vehicles. That means every 8 minutes our soldiers were burning one unit of enemy armor — without active use of aviation, especially attack helicopters, which carry the main anti-tank function in Western armies. Calling what our military is doing a “feat” would be too weak and even insulting. This is something that goes beyond a feat.