Wagner announces 42 recruitment centers in push for more soldiers

Russia’s Wagner Group recently opened dozens of new recruiting centers across the country according to the mercenary organization’s founder Yevgeny Prigozhin. 

"Recruitment centers for PMC Wagner have opened in 42 Russian cities," Prigozhin said in an audio statement his press service posted to their Telegram channel.

“There will now be new fighters who will go along with us side by side to defend their country and their family,” Prigozhin said in a translation provided by NBC News.

The Russian oligarch added that his new fighters would be used to build Russia’s “common future and protect the memory of the past.”

Wagner has been involved in a fierce fight over control of the largely strategically useless but symbolically important Ukrainian city of Bakhmut for months, and it appears as if the mercenary group’s recent push to take the settlement is stalling. 

"Despite the colossal resistance of the Ukrainian armed forces, we will move forward," Prigozhin promised as he announced Wagner’s new recruiting centers. 

“Despite the sticks in the wheels that are stuck in us at every turn, we will overcome this together,” the Wagner founder added, a sentiment he seems to have taken literally. 

Reports have slowly leaked out of Russia showing that Progzhin’s Wagner Group has been targeting Russian sports clubs as well as the country’s youth. 

On March 4th, The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) wrote in their daily campaign assessment that Prigozhin had opened at least three of his recruitment centers in sports clubs between March 2nd and 4th. 

“The new Wagner recruiting centers are reportedly based at the ‘Dynamo’ sports facility in Samara, the ‘Antares’ Sports Club in Rostov, and the Russian Boxing Federation building in Tyumen,” The Institute for the Study of War wrote.

On March 6th, ISW confirmed their earlier findings and added that Wagner had also “opened a youth branch” and was visiting schoolchildren “to lecture them about Wagner’s structure and show them unfiltered combat footage from Ukraine.”

The development of Wagner’s new recruitment centers could be Prigozhin’s response to the growing cost of his assaults against Ukrainian defenders in Bakhmut. 

Ukrainian officials have claimed that the Wagner Group has lost upwards of 30,000 soldiers in their struggle to capture Bakhmut according to information from the New York Times. 

For months, Prigozhin was able to replace his losses by recruiting new soldiers from Russia’s prisons on six-month contracts that promised freedom in exchange for service. 

Wagner’s seemingly bottomless prisoner recruitment pool ended in early February, however, when Prigozhin abruptly announced that he was no longer adding to his mercenary group’s ranks with soldiers pulled from Russia’s prisons. 

"It was never going to be the long-term approach," Simon Miles told Business Insider Erin Snodgrass in February. "It's not exactly where you go to recruit top talent."

Miles is an Assistant Professor at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy and he told Business Insider that the move away from prisoners was likely part of Prigozhin’s larger strategic goals to gain more influence through victories in the war, which would require better soldiers. 

At the time, neither Miles nor Snodgrass knew where Prigozhin planned to recruit more appropriate soldiers, though, with the mercenary leader's recent revelation, it seems his plan is to pull them from Russia’s sports clubs and maybe eventually the country's schoolchildren.