Despite heavy losses, Russia now has more than double the number of troops poised to fight in Ukraine as it did when it invaded in February.
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At the briefing on Thursday, Kirby said that 40,000 of the Wagoner group’s estimated 50,000 members were convicts. Kirby added that Washington believes at least 900 prisoners have been killed in recent fighting in East Ukraine. He said that Wagner, led by businessman Yevgeniy Prigozhin, appeared to blocked in a power struggle with other structures of the Russian army.Article content
In recent weeks, Wagner has focused on trying to capture the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, a push that has set off some of the bloodiest fighting of the war, but so far has not yielded a long-sought victory. This week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited Bakhmut and awarded medals to some of the soldiers involved in the city’s defense, highlighting Wagner’s failure so far to capture it.
The U.K. government, meanwhile, believes that Wagner fighters in Ukraine have ballooned from an estimated 1,000 in March 2022 to nearly 20,000, which the U.K. said it assesses to represent 10 percent of Russia’s forces on the ground. “They promise they’ll shoot them, and they do it, for using drugs and alcohol or for, say, sexual relations,” Romanova said. “I would say, these are mass extrajudicial executions.”
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