Over 30,000 PMC Wagner fighters have been killed or injured in Ukraine, CNN reports, citing US National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby.
Kirby says that about 9,000 out of the 30,000 were killed; out of that number, about half of the Wagner fighters were killed during the period starting from the middle of December 2022.
About 90% of the Wagner members killed in December were recruited in Russian prisons, Kirby claims.
The White House representative thinks that recruitment of Russian convicts has not stopped, despite the fact that PMC Wagner’s founder Yevgeny Prigozhin had previously said that he no longer recruited convicts for the war in Ukraine.
In summer 2022, it was reported that Russian convicts were being mass recruited to fight in the war in Ukraine. According to reports, Prigozhin personally visited penal colonies to recruit fighters.
Mediazona previously found out that at the end of 2022 PMC Wagner conducted a second wave of prison recruitment. The second time, the number of convicts willing to go to Ukraine was several times lower. At the same time, Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service reported that the number of convicts had stopped declining in penal colonies.
