(AFP) Nearly 10,000 of the 50,000 prisoners recruited from Russian prisons by the Wagner paramilitary group died in Ukraine, where they were on the front lines in the bloody battle of Bakhmut, the organization’s founder Yevgeny Prigozhin has acknowledged.
“I selected 50,000 detainees, of whom 20 percent died,” Prigozhin said in an interview published Tuesday night by pro-Kremlin blogger Konstantin Dolgov.
On the other hand, Prigozhin indicated that a similar proportion of his professional fighters also died in combat, without specifying the number.
According to him, Ukrainian losses are higher: “I have three times fewer dead (…) and about twice as many wounded,” he said.
Prigozhin spoke openly for the first time about the magnitude of his casualties, when Russian authorities do everything possible to keep the number of dead and wounded confidential.
The Russian army released its last balance sheet in September 2022, which recorded 5,900 deaths in its ranks.
A recent leak of classified U.S. documents put Russian losses on March 1 at between 35,500 and 43,500, compared to 16,000 to 17,500 for Ukraine, but the figures are impossible estimates to verify with independent sources.
Last year, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who served years in prison in the Soviet period, recruited prisoners, promising inmates the elimination of their sentences if they survived the fighting.
Ukraine claims that during the battle of Bakhmut, units of former inmates of the Wagner group carried out near-suicide attacks on the defense lines and many of them died.
Prigozhin accused the Russian military high command of depriving him of the weapons and ammunition needed to prevent the heavy losses.
“There are now tens of thousands of relatives of those who died. There will probably be hundreds of thousands. We cannot hide that,” he said in the interview published Tuesday.
The Wagner group and the Russian army announced over the weekend that they have completely conquered Bakhmut, which Ukraine denies.
Prigozhin has assured that his troops will withdraw from the city before June 1 and hand over their positions to the official army.