The head of the notorious Wagner mercenary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, thanked his fighters for their efforts in the battle for the town of Soledar in eastern Ukraine. In a video clip circulated today, which shows Prigozhin in front of a group of mercenaries in the tail of a transport plane, he recalled the last months of the war.
“Now we have half a year of war behind us, such as neither your grandfathers nor great-grandfathers experienced,” said Prigozhin. Compared to the battles for Soledar, the Red Army’s battle for Stalingrad in 1942 against the German Wehrmacht was “more like a vacation”.
During weeks of fierce fighting over the small town of Soledar in eastern Ukraine, mercenaries from Wagner’s troops led the Russian attacks. The mercenaries suffered the heaviest casualties in capturing the city. Prigozhin, a confidant of Russian President Vladimir Putin, recruited thousands of prisoners for deployment in Ukraine to Russia.
NGO: Only 10,000 Russian prisoners remain at the front
According to civil rights activists, of the 50,000 conscripts recruited from Russian prisons for the war in Ukraine, only 10,000 are still in the troops. “The rest were killed, wounded, disappeared, surrendered or deserted, including to Russia, with weapons in their hands”, said today via Telegram the non-governmental organization Rus Sidyashchaia (“Russia behind bars”).
In particular, fugitives and prisoners of war are a potential problem for Wagner’s boss, Prigozchin, said NGO founder Olga Romanova. Romanova said Prigozhin should not show these statistics to Russian President Vladimir Putin. The oligarch known as “Putin’s cook” was given unlimited powers to recruit prisoners on condition that he fully control them.