Wagner — which was founded by tycoon Yevgeniy Prigozhin, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin — has been in the spotlight in recent months for its gains in the town of Soledar and its efforts in the pitched battle for the town of Bakhmut in Ukraine’s east. The group was designated a transnational criminal organization by the United States in January.
Of the 9,000 or so mercenaries killed, half lost their lives in the two months since mid-December, Kirby said.
Russian activists and U.S. officials have said that Wagner has boosted its ranks by recruiting prisoners, many of whom are poorly trained and ill-equipped to fight. A video that circulated last year appeared to show Prigozhin promising inmates a pardon after six months of fighting.
The United States assessed in December that Wagner had recently recruited 40,000 prisoners from across Russia to join its forces. The group treats its recruits like “cannon fodder,” Kirby said Friday, “throwing them into a literal meat grinder here … without a second thought.”
Russia — and affiliates such as Wagner — has faced a shortage of personnel to send to the front lines of a conflict that Putin originally believed would only last days. While Putin ordered a partial mobilization of reserves last year, many Russian men of military age fled the country, forcing the Kremlin and Wagner to turn to prisons for recruits.
Prigozhin said in a Feb. 9 Telegram post that Wagner had “completely stopped” signing up prison inmates to fight in Ukraine, without specifying a reason — but Western officials and analysts are skeptical.
“We believe that Wagner continues to rely heavily on these convicts in the Bakhmut fighting, and that doesn’t show any signs of abating,” Kirby told reporters.
Experts at the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) also said that such recruitment is likely to continue, though in a more limited capacity. The Washington-based think tank said its analysis of Russian prison population data between November 2022 and January 2023 showed that a drop in prison numbers had stabilized, suggesting that the Kremlin is moving away from using inmates.
Prigozhin has been a loud critic of how Russian military brass has conducted the war in recent months. A Wagner fighter recently posted a video on Telegram of dead bodies in a room; the person claims the group is losing hundreds of men daily as the Kremlin is not providing them with sufficient materiel, according to an ISW translation.
The U.K.’s Defense Ministry noted Friday that Wagner fighters recruited from prison are likely to have a casualty rate of about 50 percent in Ukraine. The ministry estimates that there have been up to 200,000 combined casualties recorded by Russian troops and aligned mercenary forces since the Feb. 24 invasion, with as many as 60,000 deaths between them.
The high fatality ratio can be attributed to a lack of adequate medical care, the defense ministry said.
American and British officials say Russia has likely suffered as many as 200,000 casualties from its ongoing invasion of Ukraine. “This likely includes approximately 40-60,000 killed,” the British military said Friday.
Perhaps most notably, “The Russian casualty rate has significantly increased since September 2022 when ‘partial mobilization’ was imposed,” the Brits say, and note, “This is almost certainly due to extremely rudimentary medical provision across much of the force.” The U.S. remarks came from Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland, according to CNN reporting Thursday.
Слава Україні
🌎🌏🌍❤️🇺🇦
No comments:
Post a Comment