The head of Russia’s Wagner mercenary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, said his fighters tried for weeks at times to seize a single house in the embattled Donbass town of Bakhmut, providing the latest evidence of how the Kremlin’s efforts there have stalled .
In a somber video released over the New Year, Prigozhin – a key Putin ally – was filmed visiting a basement near the Eastern Front filled with the bodies of his fighters, many of them convicts, killed during the fierce fighting for the city had been killed, a key Russian target since the summer.
In the makeshift morgue, Prigozhin’s bodies can be seen on stretchers and in body bags. A pile of sacked bodies can be seen in the corner of one of the rooms, stacked shoulder-high.
“Their contract has expired, they will go home next week,” Prigozhin is heard saying, adding: “These are being prepared for shipment. We all work on New Year’s Eve.
“Here lie Wagner fighters who fell at the front. They will now be placed in zinc coffins and returned home.”
As more bodies are lifted from a truck, Prigozhin can be heard delivering New Year’s greetings.
Wagner has played a key role in the Russian offensive against Bakhmut, with Ukrainian soldiers interviewed by the Guardian saying Wagner fighters were often used as shock troops in frontal attacks on their positions, while recently mobilized Russians were used in more defensive roles.
While Ukrainian sources and Russian military blogs have long indicated that Wagner suffered heavy casualties in the months-long attack, the footage – and Prigozhin’s commentary – has underscored the severe extent of the attrition.
In a second footage from his visit to the Eastern Front, Prigozhin confirmed the difficulties his forces had encountered. “Everyone wants to know when we capture [Bakhmut]“, he explains, using the Russian name Artemovsk for the city.
A screenshot of Yevgeny Prigozhin approaching inmates of a Russian prison, offering them freedom in exchange for fighting Wagner Group mercenaries in Ukraine. Photo: Twitter“In Artemovsk, every house has become a fortress. Our boys sometimes fight over a house for more than a day. Sometimes they fight over a house for weeks. And behind this house there is still a new line of defense, and none. And how many such lines of defense are there in Artemovsk? Five hundred would probably not be exaggerated.”
An unnamed Wagner soldier whom Prigozhin meets complains about the difficulties they face there. “We don’t have enough equipment, not enough BMP3 [armoured cars] and mussels,” he says.
In separate footage shot by Bakhmut on January 2, a Ukrainian soldier named Kiyanyn describes the ongoing struggle. Amid shells, he describes how fighters in his neighborhood repelled several large-scale attacks on the city he calls “the fortress.”
“They came like insects. We had to resupply ammunition several times… The line of defense is up and running.”
The latest fighting in the east came as Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia was preparing to step up its attacks on the country using exploding Iranian-made drones.
“We have information that Russia is planning a prolonged attack by Shaheds [exploding drones]’ Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address late Monday.
He said the goal is to break Ukraine’s resistance by “wearing out our people, [our] Air Defense, Our Power,” more than 10 months after Russia invaded its neighbor.
Zelenskyi spoke after Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared to be looking for ways to reignite his flawed war effort, which has been thwarted in recent months by a Ukrainian counter-offensive backed by Western weapons.
In the latest embarrassment for the Kremlin, Ukrainian forces fired rockets at a facility in the eastern Donetsk region where Russian soldiers were stationed, killing 63 of them, according to the Russian Defense Ministry. Other unconfirmed reports put the death toll much higher.
It was one of the deadliest attacks on Kremlin forces since the war began more than a decade ago.
In the attack, Ukrainian forces fired six missiles from a Himar launch system, two of which were shot down, the Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement.
However, the Strategic Communications Directorate of the Ukrainian Armed Forces claimed on Sunday that about 400 mobilized Russian soldiers were killed and about 300 others injured in a vocational school building in Makiivka. This claim could not be independently verified.
The Russian statement said the strike took place “in the Makiivka area” and that no mention was made of the vocational school.
The Associated Press contributed to this report