In St. Petersburg is the brand new headquarters of the Wagner mercenary company, often referred to as the Wagner Group. But about 1,400 km southeast of the headquarters, there is little luxury in coming across mercenaries from the company fighting the Ukrainian forces there.
“According to our data, 42,000 to 43,000 inmates had joined the company by the end of December. Today the number is probably over 50,000,” said Olga Romanova, founder of the organization “Russia Behind Bars”, which works on prisoners’ rights issues.
“Only 10,000 of them are on the battlefield now because the rest have been killed.” . . they disappeared, defected or surrendered,” she said. Moscow time .
From this it is not really possible to conclude anything other than that the prisoners were simply blackened on the battlefield.
Ukrainian soldiers described how Wagner’s troops are sent forward in a manner similar to what was done in World War II. They even had to cross the bodies of their fallen comrades.
John Kirby, spokesman for the United States National Security Council, said recently press conference that Wagner’s conquests at Bakhmut and Soledar proved to be very costly for the company. “About 90% of Wagner’s casualties are ex-prisoners who have just been released from prison and sent to the battlefield with little or no training behind them, with no organization. So it was bought at a high price” , did he declare.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy , the President of Ukraine, described it this way recently: “The area of ​​Soledar is covered with the bodies of the attackers. That’s what madness looks like.”
The New York Times claims that, based on satellite images, there are a number of Wagner family graves in Krasnodar. The size of the Bakinskja cemetery increased sevenfold from November 24 to January 24.
Vitaly Votanovsky, a former Russian army officer, devoted himself to finding Wagner’s secret tombs and reports on his findings on Telegram. He told locals that the bodies of many Wagner members had been burned and therefore not buried.
A cemetery used by Russia’s notorious Wagner mercenary group has grown rapidly in recent months, satellite images and video footage show. This is rare visual evidence of the consequences of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Wagner.
— The New York Times (@nytimes) January 25, 2023
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the owner of Wagner, recently recognized the existence of the burial places and visited some of them. “For those who don’t know where they want to be buried, we bury near the Wagner Chapel,” he reportedly said recently. The New York Times .
CNN recently shed light on why Wagner, and in particular the prisoners, suffered so many losses. This is based on a report from the Ukrainian intelligence service. He states that Wagner often uses a special tactic on the battlefield where prisoners are left behind in the first wave of attack and therefore suffer the most casualties. “The fact that several thousand Wagnerians die is of no importance to Russian society,” the report said.
It’s not just on the battlefield that Prigozhin makes big speeches and expects damage. According to Evaluation according to the American think tank Institute for the Study of War (ISW), there are many indications that his popularity with Putin is declining. The think tank says Putin has made the decision to turn away from Prigozhin and Wagner and now relies instead on the defense minister and the supreme commander of the armed forces.
According to ISW, Putin may have felt threatened by Prigozhin’s progress and his tactless self-worship.
