An investigation by Russian outlet Mediazona and BBC Russia has found that 20,000 of Wagner troops died during last year’s brutal assault on the Ukrainian town of Bakhmut and the majority were convicts recruited by Evgeny Prigozhin.
Wagner led the attack on Bakhmut that was eventually taken by Russian forces, but very few regular Russian army troops were used in the assault, which was one of the bloodiest battles of the war in Ukraine.
The Wagner PMC (private military company) group's high death toll was due to its commanders simply throwing wave after wave of soldiers into the fight with little regard to the casualty rate, the investigation concludes.
The investigation also found that Prigozhin, who died last year in a plane crash after an aborted rebellion against the Kremlin, had recruited a total of 48,366 convicts from Russian jails.
The convicts were promised a six-month service at the front in exchange for a pardon, expungement of their criminal records, and substantial pay and insurance payouts for their families in case of death or injury.
'Operation Meatgrinder,' as the battle for Bakhmut was known within Wagner, saw most of these fighters perish. The battle, which Prigozhin claimed began on October 8, 2022, and ended on May 20, 2023, Mediazona reports, However, Wagner mercenaries were already present and deaths of members of the company were reported as early as July 15, 2022 running through to June 6, 2023 after the battle was over, according to the records. This extended timeline means the battle lasted 327 days.
The records indicate that 19,547 Wagner fighters died in the battle for Bakhmut, including 17,175 convicts and 2,372 volunteer mercenaries. Prigozhin had publicly claimed that his private military company recruited around 50,000 prisoners, a figure consistent with the dog tags for 48,366 men identified in the records.
Journalists calculate that Wagner Group spent nearly RUB108bn ($1.3bn) on payments to the relatives of its men killed in the fight for Bakhmut. Russian President Vladimir Putin later admitted that the Kremlin had paid the group over $1bn from the state budget. Each family received 5mn ($61,000) in compensation, plus an additional RUB300,000 ($3,700) for funeral arrangements. The families of recruited convicts collectively received 92.5bn ($1.14bn), while the families of regular mercenaries received RUB15.4bn ($189mn).
The investigation corroborates Prigozhin’s claim that Wagner Group lost about 20,000 men in Bakhmut but reveals discrepancies in his statements about death rates, Mediazona reports. In a May 2023 interview, Prigozhin falsely claimed that the death rates among recruited convicts and volunteer mercenaries were roughly equal at 20%.
Prigozhin asserted that the objective of the 'Bakhmut meatgrinder' was to exhaust the enemy by inflicting heavy casualties on Ukrainian forces. He claimed that 50,000 Ukrainian soldiers died defending the city, with another 50,000-70,000 wounded. However, the Ukrainian project UALosses, which tracks military casualties through obituaries, has confirmed the deaths of only 8,900 Ukrainian soldiers in the battle for Bakhmut. Nevertheless, the toll on the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) was heavy and the command lost many of its best veterans in the battle while attempting to hold the city against the Russian onslaught.
