During the entire war in Ukraine, 20,000 mercenaries of PMC Wagner were killed, half of them were recruited prisoners, PMC founder Yevgeny Prigozhin said in an interview with media technologist Konstantin Dolgov.
“During the operation (in Bakhmut) I chose 50 thousand prisoners, of which about 20 percent died. They died exactly the same as those who came to us under the contract. Approximately another 20 percent are the wounded who have wounds, which make it impossible to perform combat missions for three months or more,” Prigogine said.
According to the founder of the PMC, at the time of the battles for Bakhmut, 35,000 mercenaries remained in the military company.
In early May, John Kirby, strategic communications coordinator at the US National Security Council, citing US intelligence data, said that since the beginning of 2023, Russia has lost 20,000 dead in Ukraine, half of them Wagnerians. According to him, a significant part of the losses fell on Bakhmut. About 80,000 more Russian soldiers were wounded in battles in this and other areas.
The Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation does not disclose data on the number of soldiers, volunteers and prisoners killed in the war with Ukraine. The last time the agency announced the total number of personnel losses in September 2022 was 5937 dead.
According to their sources and open data, journalists from the Russian service of the BBC and Mediazona confirmed the death of more than 22,500 Russian soldiers in Ukraine. At the same time, according to them, 10,230 Russian soldiers have died since December 1, 2022, when the Russian army tried to develop an offensive in several areas of the Donetsk and Lugansk regions. Journalists believe that Russia’s real losses in the dead are at least twice as many as the figures that they were able to confirm, that is, at least 45,000 people.
“From 130,000 to 270,000 killed and wounded, that’s just the military.” Ruslan Leviev from CIT – about the losses of Russia during the year of the war in Ukraine:
