KIEV, Ukraine — Russia’s private army chief Wagner says his force lost more than 20,000 men in the protracted Battle of Bakhmut, with about half of those who died in the eastern Ukrainian city being Russian convicts sent to fight in the Ukraine were recruited 15 months old war.
That figure was in stark contrast to Moscow’s widely disputed claims that just over 6,000 of its troops had been killed during the war as of January. By way of comparison, official Soviet troop losses in the 1979-89 Afghan war totaled 15,000 men.
Ukraine has not said how many of its soldiers have died since the full-scale invasion of Russia began in February 2022.
Analysts estimate that in the nine-month battle for Bakhmut alone, tens of thousands of soldiers were killed, including Russian convicts who reportedly received little training before being sent to the front lines.
Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin also said Russia’s invasion goal of “demilitarizing” Ukraine backfired because Kiev’s military had grown stronger with weapons supplies and training from its Western allies.
In an interview with Konstantin Dolgov, a pro-Kremlin political strategist, published late Tuesday, Prigozhin added that Russian forces had killed civilians – something Moscow has repeatedly and vehemently denied.
Prigozhin, a wealthy businessman with long-standing ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, is known for his bluster — often laced with profanity — and has previously made unverifiable claims, some of which he later retracted.
Earlier this month, his media team released a video of him screaming, cursing and pointing to about 30 uniformed bodies on the ground, saying they were Wagner fighters who died in a single day. He claimed that the Russian Defense Ministry had deprived his men of ammunition and threatened to abandon the fight for Bakhmut.
Prigozhin said in an interview on Tuesday that it is possible that Kiev’s expected counter-offensive in the coming weeks could push Russian forces out of southern and eastern Ukraine and annexed Crimea, given continued Western support.
“A pessimistic scenario: the Ukrainians are getting missiles, they are preparing troops, of course they will continue their offensive and try a counterattack,” he said. “They will attack Crimea, they will try to blow up the Crimean bridge (to the Russians). mainland), cut (our) supply lines. Therefore we must prepare for a hard war.”
Prigozhin’s interview, which was published on a Telegram channel that has just 50,000 followers, has not been picked up by Russia’s main state or pro-Kremlin media outlets and is unlikely to be widely disseminated. It also seemed to go unmentioned among military bloggers, whose popular Telegram pages are important sources of information about the war for many Russians.
Ukraine’s general staff said on Wednesday that “heavy fighting” continued in Bakhmut, days after Russia said it had fully captured the devastated city. Bakhmut is in Donetsk Province, one of four provinces that Russia illegally annexed last fall and only partially controls.
Ukraine’s Ground Forces chief Oleksandr Syrskyi said Kiev forces “continued their defensive operation” in Bakhmut and had made unspecified “successes” on the outskirts. He did not give any further details.
A Ukrainian commander in Bakhmut told the Associated Press on Tuesday that the Ukrainians had a plan to expel the Russians from all occupied territories.
“But now we don’t have to fight in Bakhmut anymore, we have to surround and block it from the flanks,” said Yevhen Meshevikin. “Then we should ‘sweep’ it. That’s more appropriate, and we’re doing that now.”
Elsewhere, Russian forces shot down “a large number” of drones in Russia’s southern Belgorod region, a local official said on Wednesday, a day after Moscow announced its forces had repelled a cross-border attack into the region from Ukraine.
The drones were intercepted overnight, Belgorod governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said in a Telegram post, and another was shot down on Wednesday outside the local capital, also called Belgorod. He said no one was hurt but there was property damage of an unspecified amount.
Ukrainian officials initially did not comment.
Gladkov said Tuesday he had “questions for (Russia’s) Defense Ministry” after the attack, which reportedly sparked concern among locals and embarrassed the Kremlin.
During a question-and-answer session with local residents on social media, Gladkov agreed with a participant who said the Russian military’s actions in Belgorod “raised some questions”.
In Moscow, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu promised to respond to such attacks “swiftly and extremely harshly.”
On Tuesday, Russia said it had repelled the cross-border attack, one of the worst of its kind in the war. According to the Defense Ministry, more than 70 attackers were killed in the approximately 24-hour battle. No Russian casualties were mentioned.
Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said local troops, airstrikes and artillery routed the attackers.
Twelve civilians were injured in the attack, officials said, and an elderly woman died during an evacuation.
Details of the incident in the rural region some 80 kilometers (45 miles) north of the eastern Ukraine city of Kharkiv and far from the front lines of the nearly 15-month war are unclear.
Moscow blamed Ukrainian military saboteurs for the raid, which began on Monday. Kiev described it as an uprising by Russian partisans against the Kremlin. It was impossible to reconcile the two versions, to say with certainty who was behind the attack, or to determine its targets.
The region is a Russian military center with fuel and ammunition depots. Moscow officials declined to say how many attackers were involved or why it took so long to put down the attack.
The Belgorod region, like the neighboring Bryansk region and other border areas, experienced sporadic repercussions from the war that Russia began with the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
At least three civilians died and 18 others were injured on Tuesday and overnight across Ukraine, Ukraine’s Presidential Office reported on Wednesday, including in the southern Kherson region where two elderly people died in airstrikes.
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Kozlowska reported from London. Yuras Karmanau in Tallinn, Estonia made a contribution.
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Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine