TEN THOUSAND RUSSIAN CONVICT RECRUITS KILLED IN UKRAINE: WAGNER BOSS PRIGOZHIN

Wed 24 May 2023:

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Russian mercenary group Wagner, claims that almost 10,000 of the inmates he recruited to fight in Ukraine have died in battle, AFP reported.

In an effort to persuade prisoners to fight alongside Wagner in Ukraine in exchange for a promised pardon upon their return should they survive, Prigozhin visited Russian jails last year.

Convicts are thought to have been used as cannon fodder in Ukraine, accounting for the majority of Wagner’s losses there.

“I took 50,000 prisoners of which around 20 percent were killed,” Prigozhin said in a video interview published late Tuesday.

Prigozhin said a similar percentage were killed among those who had signed a contract with Wagner, but did not give a precise figure.

Both the mercenary outfit and regular Russian troops said at the weekend that the flashpoint town of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine had fallen, but Kyiv said Ukrainian forces continued to fight for it.

Prigozhin, whose power has grown dramatically over the course of the nearly year-long offensive, has scathingly criticized Russia’s senior commanders, accusing them of being to blame for massive losses.

Prigozhin, a personal friend of President Vladimir Putin, has criticized Russia’s elites, claiming that their children live luxuriously while men from impoverished regions die in Ukraine.

Prigozhin stated that his men will leave the Bakhmut by June 1 and hand over control to the Russian army.

The White House announced in early May that more than 20,000 Russian troops were killed and another 80,000 had been injured in five months of battle in eastern Ukraine, mainly in Bakhmut.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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