Only ten thousand of Wagner's prisoner recruits are still fighting in Ukraine

Out of the roughly 50,000 Russian prisoners recruited by Yevgeny Prigozin’s Wagner Group for operations in Ukraine, only 10,000 are still fighting according to a leading Russian prisoner advocacy group. 

Olga Romanova is the head of Russia Behind Bars, a non-governmental organization dedicated to helping Russian convicts, and she recently revealed some startling statistics about her country’s mercenary prisoner population. 

“Our data shows that, as of late December, 42,000–43,000 inmates had been recruited,” Romanova revealed in a video published by My Russian Rights. “By now, this is probably upwards of 50,000.” 

“Out of that number,” Romanova added, “10,000 are now fighting at the front, because the rest have either been killed or wounded, or went AWOL, or deserted, or surrendered.”

Romanova’s claim shouldn’t be surprising for those following along with the war in Ukraine. Wagner’s prisoner fighters have been at the forefront of Russia’s most intense battles in Donetsk Oblast. 

“For months, Wagner has been locked in a bloody battle of attrition to take the towns of Bakhmut and Soledar in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region,” wrote Reuters journalists Felix Light, Filipp Lebedev, and Reade Levinson.

“Western and Ukrainian officials have said it is using convicts as cannon fodder to overwhelm Ukraine’s defenses,” the Reuters journalists added. 

Conditions for Russia’s mercenary troops have been so bad that it's resulted in thousands of desertions, a problem Olga Romanov says the Wagner Group has been facing since at least last fall. 

Verifying Romanova’s claims about the number of recruited Russian prisoners is a relatively easy task, even though neither Russia nor Wagner have provided any statistics on the mercenary group's recruits. 

According to reporting from The Washington Post, the United States was in agreement with Russia Behind Bars in its assessment of Wagner’s recruitment rates. 

“The United States estimates that Wagner now has 50,000 troops deployed in Ukraine,” wrote Mary Ilyushina, “including 10,000 contractors and 40,000 convicts recruited from prisons.”

“That assessment matches data collected by Russia Behind Bars,” Ilyushina added, “which is tracking the prisoners’ involvement in the war.”

Advisor to President Volodymyr Zelensky, Mykhailo Podolyak, also believes Wagner had recruited roughly 50,000 Russian prisoners according to The Kyiv Independent.

“According to Podolyak, 38,244 Russian convicts have been recruited to fight in Ukraine, 29,543 of which have either been killed, captured, or injured by Ukrainian forces,” wrote The Kiyv Independent.

Proving Romanov’s claim that only 10,000 Wagner convict recruits were still fighting in Ukraine is slightly more difficult to prove than their overall recruitment numbers. 

The Kyiv Independent noted that Mykhailo Podolyak claimed Wagner had lost about 77% of its recruited convicts. But such a statement should be taken with a grain of salt. 

Regardless of how many convicted prisoners are still fighting in Russia, it is clear from statements made by a former Wagner Group officer that the organization doesn’t value the lives of the people they've recruited from Russia’s prisons. 

Recently defected Wagner officer Andrei Medvedev told CNN’s Anderson Cooper from a Norwegian prison cell that Wagner commanders often just killed prisoners who didn’t want to fight in front of new recruits. 

“They would round up those who did not want to fight and shoot them in front of newcomers,” Medvedev alleged. 

“They brought two prisoners who refused to go fight and they shot them in front of everyone and buried them right in the trenches that were dug by the trainees.”

Medvedev also told Cooper that he eventually commanded a very large group of fighters because of the high turnover. 

“I couldn’t count how many,” Medvedev said. “They were in constant circulation. Dead bodies, more prisoners, more dead bodies, more prisoners.” Maybe that’s why so few former convicts are still fighting in Ukraine...