KYIV, Ukraine — Russia’s Wagner mercenary group has been forced to use more of its professional recruits in Bakhmut to replace its depleted supply of enlisted prisoners, who are perishing by the thousands in the longest battle of the war, a Ukrainian official said on Tuesday.
The claim suggested that Ukraine sees an opportunity, despite the heavy casualties it has suffered in the eastern city, to exhaust Wagner’s nearly suicidal prisoner assaults, which Ukraine’s commanders regard as one of Russia’s most effective tactics.
“This is their last stand,” Col. Serhiy Cherevaty, a spokesman for Ukraine’s eastern group of forces, told Radio Liberty in an interview, referring to Wagner’s forces in Bakhmut, where Russia and Ukraine’s vicious, monthslong struggle has left thousands of soldiers dead and the city in rubble.
Ukrainian officials have claimed that nearly 30,000 of Wagner’s 50,000 troops have deserted or been killed or wounded, many around Bakhmut. That number could not be independently verified, and Ukraine has not disclosed its own losses in the region. Russia’s defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, claimed on Tuesday that Ukraine had lost more than 11,000 troops in February.
As the fight for Bakhmut appears to be entering a decisive phase, both sides are trying to justify their staggering losses in a minor city of limited strategic value by presenting them as benefiting their cause. Each makes essentially the same claim: that the fighting there is worth the horrific cost because it is wearing down the enemy.
Wagner’s founder, Yegveny V. Prigozhin, has repeatedly said that his group’s triple-digit daily casualty rates are sucking experienced Ukrainian units into what he calls the “Bakhmut meat-grinder,” upsetting their offensive plans elsewhere.
President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Monday that rather than withdraw from the city, as had been rumored, Ukraine would send reinforcements into Bakhmut, where Ukrainian commanders say the fighting has tied down enormous Russian forces.
The true strategic legacy of the battle will most likely be ultimately written by its victors.
Wagner’s mercenaries have significantly helped Russia edge toward encircling Bakhmut, largely by throwing waves of former inmates toward Ukrainian positions, wearing Kyiv’s forces down at heavy cost. “Almost all of them have been killed” in Bakhmut, Colonel Cherevaty said of the prisoner units.
Some analysts say that if Ukraine can eliminate Russia’s prisoner soldiers in Bakhmut, they will not have to face their attack waves elsewhere. The number of “Russian convict recruits suitable for combat is not limitless,” the Institute for the Study of War, a research group in Washington, said in a communiqué this week. The group echoed Ukraine’s assessment that Wagner units were shifting toward higher-quality special forces because of the high losses suffered by prison recruits.
On Monday, Mr. Prigozhin himself appeared to sound an alarm, calling for urgent reinforcements and ammunition to withstand a potential Ukrainian counteroffensive he said could not only relieve Bakhmut’s besieged defenders, but even cut off the Wagner attackers. “Otherwise, we’re all in” trouble, he said, using an expletive in an audio message published on social media.
Mr. Prigozhin has suggested that his growing public feud with Russia’s Defense Ministry last month has cost him access to Russian prisons, where since July he was able to enlist tens of thousands of inmates with a promise of high salaries, social rehabilitation and freedom — if they survive their deployments. He had called the loss of prison recruitment an attempt to “bleed out” Wagner of its “offensive potential.”
U.S. intelligence officials in December estimated that Wagner comprised about 10,000 professional soldiers, recruited mostly from veterans of Russia’s security forces, and 40,000 former inmates. Wagner defectors and Russian prison rights activists say inmates are thrown into battle after just two weeks of training, and are used mostly to charge Ukrainian positions in small, unprotected groups, in order to expose the location of enemy fire and dig foxholes for subsequent assault waves.
Wagner’s leaders treat the prison units as expendable, with most of its members killed days or even hours after arriving at the front, according to Wagner defectors, Russian prison rights activists and Ukrainian officials and military commanders.
However, one inmate recruit who this month returned home after serving his six-month contract with Wagner, including around Bakhmut, has described his survival chances as a coin toss, suggesting that different Wagner commanders use varying assault tactics. The soldier said that of about 170 inmates who enlisted from his penal colony in Russia’s Ivanov region last fall, about 80 have returned home without major injuries.
The soldier, who is not identified because of the threat of retribution, told his friends that he plans to return to the front for a new stint with Wagner, reflecting the relatively high salaries paid by the mercenary group and the limited work prospects for former prisoners.
Although Wagner lost its ability to recruit in prisons, units composed of inmates will almost certainly continue to appear in the war. Mr. Prigozhin and Russian human rights activists have said the Russian military, itself, has recently started recruiting inmates.
The Russian prison service still had more than 400,000 inmates at the start of the year, according to its website, suggesting a large remaining pool of potential recruits.
As for Wagner, Mr. Prigozhin has attempted to substitute the loss of prison access by redoubling efforts to attract professional fighters. Wagner recruitment appeals in recent weeks have appeared on billboards, social media and even on prime-time state television shows.
In addition, social media accounts affiliated with Wagner have intensified propaganda portraying the mercenary force as the preferred destination for Russian patriots.
In one video posted on social media channels last week, eight heavily armed men claiming to come from a demobilized Russian Army unit appeal to Mr. Prigozhin to accept them into his ranks. The video could not be independently verified, but hours later Mr. Prigozhin published an audio message accepting them.
“When people want to fight and not sit around firing ranges or bases, it’s necessary to do it,” he said.
Mr. Prigozhin and his allies claim that Wagner’s main task in Bakhmut is not territorial gain, but the depletion of experienced Ukrainian units that could have been fighting in other sections of the 600-mile front line.
“The Ukrainian forces send all their combat-ready units to Bakhmut,” Mr. Prigozhin said in late January.
As an example, some pro-war Russian military bloggers — an influential group that closely tracks the war — said the intensification of the Bakhmut battle had coincided with the end of Ukrainian advances in the Kreminna area farther north, where the Kremlin’s forces appear to have regained the initiative in recent weeks. Some Western analysts have made the same point, saying that the fighting in Bakhmut is starting to sap Ukrainian strength before an expected counteroffensive.
That campaign will likely focus on the southern region of Zaporizhzhia, where Ukraine is building up forces, Col. Roman Kostenko, a member of Ukraine’s Parliament who is serving in the country’s military, told Ukrainian television on Monday.
Ukraine may try to approach the Russian-held port of Melitopol and drive a wedge between Russian forces in the Crimean Peninsula and those in eastern Ukraine, military analysts and Ukrainian officials say. “The Zaporizhzhia direction is as dangerous as the eastern one,” Colonel Kostenko said, referring to parallel Russian efforts to control the area.
In another region of southern Ukraine, the Ukrainian authorities urged residents on Tuesday to evacuate because of shelling by Russian forces, in a tacit acknowledgment that efforts to restore normal life to the area have been thwarted. Ukraine recaptured the city of Kherson last fall, but Russian troops remained on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River, in position to batter civilians and Ukrainian troops with artillery.
Heavy casualties in Bakhmut could hamper Ukraine’s ability to mount a counteroffensive there or elsewhere, raising problems similar to those facing Russian commanders, analysts said.
The tenacious defense of Bakhmut has expended Russian manpower and ammunition, Michael Kofman, a Washington-based expert on the Russian military at the Center for Naval Analyses, wrote on Twitter on Sunday after visiting the Bakhmut area.
“Strategies can reach points of diminishing returns,” he wrote. “This fight doesn’t play to Ukraine’s advantages as a force.”
Andrew E. Kramer reported from Kyiv, Ukraine, and Anatoly Kurmanaev from Berlin. Reporting was contributed by Ivan Nechepurenko from Tbilisi, Georgia; Ekaterina Bodyagina from Berlin; and Alina Lobzina and Matthew Mpoke Bigg from London.
