17,000 prisoners died – in one fell swoop

Over 17,000 Russian prisoners died in the so-called “meat grinder”, the battle for Bachmut in eastern Ukraine.
It shows a review from BBC and The media zone as The Express was the first in Sweden to report on.
That’s far more than Russia and Wagner’s leader Yevgeny Prigozhin have admitted, and more than the official death toll for the Soviets’ nine-year war in Afghanistan.

At the beginning of May last year, Yevgeny Prigozhin was filmed in a field outside Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, surrounded by dead bodies and with a trembling voice. The blood is still hot, he says – the men have just fallen in the “meat grinder”, the invasion of Bachmut.

– This is someone’s father, this is someone’s son, he says.

The leader of the notorious paramilitary Wagner group looks into the camera and almost screams that the Russian leadership has failed them: “Where the hell is the ammunition?”

But the BBC and Mediazona have now come across leaked documents from the Wagner leader’s company which show that the huge losses – up to 200 dead a day – began as early as four months earlier. And they weren’t due to a lack of ammunition.

Looking for soldiers in prisons

Many of the soldiers in the Wagner Group had been recruited from prisons. The review shows that Yevgeny Prigozhin had visited about a hundred high-security prisons in Russia – including the one where Alexei Navalny died – and offered inmates a chance at freedom if they first fought for Wagner in Ukraine.

According to the review, he was particularly looking for people who were in prison for murder or robbery.

– The ideal candidate has been convicted several times. He is between 30 and 45 years old, self-confident, resilient. The best is if he has beaten a policeman, says Prigozhin during one of the recruitment campaigns.

The prisoners received short training and substandard equipment before being sent to the front.

Most intense fighting since World War II

Two weeks after the field video was recorded, Prigozhin stated that his forces had taken control of Bachmut. The city had 70,000 inhabitants before the war and is not very strategically important, but control over it developed into a kind of prestige issue.

The battle began in the late summer of 2022 and has been described as the most intense street fighting in Europe since World War II.

Prigozhin said he lost 20,000 soldiers in the fighting, and that half of them were prisoners. But the real figure was nearly 90 percent prisoners:

He also said that 20,000 of his soldiers had died in the fighting and that half of them were prisoners. But the real figure is almost 90 percent prisoners – 17,175.

The BBC and Mediazona have verified ID tags showing that a total of at least 48,000 prisoners fought for Prigozhin.