AFP: The head of Russian mercenary group Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, has said that around 10,000 prisoners he recruited to fight in Ukraine have been killed on the battlefield.
Last year, Prigozhin toured Russian prisons in a bid to convince inmates to fight with Wagner in Ukraine, in exchange for a promised amnesty upon their return should they survive. Convicts are believed to have been used as cannon fodder in Ukraine, accounting for most of Wagner’s losses in the pro-Western country. “I took 50,000 prisoners of which around 20 percent were killed,” Prigozhin said in a video interview published late Tuesday. Prigozhin said a similar percentage were killed among those who had signed a contract with Wagner, but did not give a precise figure.