Of the 9,000 or so mercenaries killed, half lost their lives in the two months since mid-December, Kirby said.
Russian activists and US officials say Wagner swelled its ranks by recruiting prisoners, many of whom were poorly trained and ill-equipped to fight. A video that circulated last year appeared to show Prigozhin promising prisoners 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 his forces. The group treats its recruits like “cannon fodder,” Kirby said Friday, “throwing them through a literal meat grinder here … without hesitation.”
Russia — and allies like Wagner — are facing a shortage of personnel to send to the front lines in a conflict that Putin initially believed would last only days. As Putin ordered a partial mobilization of the 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 Telegram post on February 9 that Wagner “completely stopped” signing up prison inmates to fight in Ukraine, for no specific reason – but Western officials and analysts are skeptical.
“We believe that Wagner continues to rely heavily on these criminals in the Bakhmut fight, 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 recruitment is likely to continue, albeit in a more limited capacity. The Washington-based think tank said an analysis of data on Russia’s prison population between November 2022 and January 2023 shows that the decline in prison numbers is improving, suggesting that the Kremlin is distancing itself from the use of prisoners.
Prigozhin has been a vocal critic of how the Russian military has handled the war in recent months. A Wagner fighter recently posted a video on Telegram of dead bodies in a room; the person claims that the group is losing hundreds of people every day because the Kremlin is not giving them enough material, according to an ISW translation.
the UK Ministry of Defence It was noted on Friday that Wagner fighters recruited from prison tend 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 February 24 invasion, with 60,000 deaths among them.
The high death toll ratio can be attributed to the lack of adequate medical care, the defense ministry said.